First Review For Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens Hits...And It's Good!

Following the premiere in San Diego last night, the first review for Iron Man and Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau's latest movie have started to emerge, and the good news is that they're extremely positive so far! Here are some excerpts from The Hollywood Reporter, but be sure to click on the link below to head on over to the site to read the review in full. With even more expected to be released online throughout the day, stay tuned for more info on the critical response to Cowboys & Aliens as and when we have it.

Fusion is everything in gourmet cuisine these days, so why shouldn’t filmmakers mix and match movie genres no matter how crazy? Cowboys & Aliens— well, the title says it all. Taking the idea from a Platinum Studios graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, this film from Jon Favreau shrewdly blends an alien invasion movie into a western. The key to its success lies in the determination by everyone involved to play the damn thing straight. Even the slightest goofiness, the tiniest touch of camp, and the whole thing would blow sky high. But it doesn’t.

If you were to assess the mix, it would be about 70% western to 30% alien invasion. Which is pretty bold given that aliens are all the rage and the last western to make a lasting impression was probably Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Unforgiven. But that’s where shrewdness comes in: You expect space invasions; a western is a tricky thing to pull off.

Take a look at the credit box for this film and you’ll see an all-star team of Hollywood producers, exec producers and writers. But such is the overriding intelligence and singular vision in this picture that you have to assume that Favreau deserves the credit for keeping things true to both genres. A surprisingly good western is taking place before those creatures drop down from another planet. True, the western characters and story are awfully familiar to those who still treasure the genre. But the western was always a conservative genre that stuck close to its traditions while allowing plenty of room for storytelling.

Just as a showdown of epic proportions seems imminent, an even greater showdown explodes in the town in a great what the f---moment. Alien spacecrafts strafe the town and abduct a number of its citizens including the Colonel’s son. Equally surprising is how the stranger’s wrist ornament suddenly springs to life as the only successful weapon against these alien forces. The stranger, as strangers always do in westerns, has demonstrated his usefulness.
Cowboys & Aliens has now reached the crucial juncture that will either make or break this odd admixture of a movie. Had the film given way to this sci-fi onslaught, the whole thing might have turned into the fiasco that was 1999’s Wild Wild West.

But no, Favreau and his legion of screenwriters wisely cling to the western framework. The clear model for the rest of the movie is John Ford’sThe Searchers, about a Comanche abduction of a white girl, and her would-be rescuers let by John Wayne’s virulently racist uncle to whom Indians were on the same level as reptilian space aliens.

As this posse tracks the aliens down to their lair with some unexpected help from the mysterious Ella, the movie becomes perhaps a tad more conventional. Some of the movie’s niftiest sequences and best character-reveals happen during this rescue, but if there is a weakness here it’s the aliens themselves.
Thanks to quite a few filmmakers, including one of the many exec producers here, Steven Spielberg, audiences are used to greater detail and more empathy for movie space creatures, even as recently as the one in Super 8. The alien villains here, while ingenious from a CGI standpoint with multi-layered malevolence in bodies that pull back endoplasmic surfaces to reveal further weapons of destruction, don’t rate as characters. They are more like moving blobs you shoot at in a video game. Bam — gotcha!

Nevertheless, as the first of undoubtedly a bunch of copycat genre mash-ups, some of which are bound to be horrendous, Cowboys & Aliens is a solid success. For a tent-pole, Comic-Con movie, this one devotes a gratifying amount of time to character and achieves most of its success because Favreau has intelligently cast his film and let his actors do their thing. As good as the visual effects are, you walk away from the movie with a memory of actors’ faces, lines of dialogue and actions that speak more to character than to shock-and-awe.

It sounds kooky on paper but on the screen cowboys and aliens make beautiful, fun music together.