COWBOYS AND ALIENS COSTUME MOVIE
Though I’ve only described the first fifteen minutes of the movie, that is literally the entire plot (with the exception of a surprise reveal from Beautiful Girl), and, I suspect I’ve just written more words about this movie than were in the screenplay. Beautiful Girl ends up needing rescue and then eventually naked, the Wise Preacher ends up dead, there’s a character named Doc, and some wise old Indians that they need to partner with to discover The Cowboy’s memories and defeat their alien foe. The Cowboy finds out that his bracelet is an effective weapon against the alien ships, and, after some predictable hesitation and an extremely brief and fairly unsuccessful Spirit Journey to find his memories, decides to join the Cattle Rancher and the Townsfolk in a search party to find the aliens and rescue the kidnapped.įrom there, it gets simpler and more clichéd. But never fear! Just as he’s being loaded into the jail wagon, the aliens show up, blasting the town apart and stealing lots of townsfolk by roping them from their ships and dragging them into the air. The Sheriff gives us an update, and it looks like Cowboy is going to be sent to Santa Fe on charges he can’t remember.
The Cowboy wakes up in a jail cell next to the Spoiled Kid who is mocking The Cowboy again that is, until The Cowboy reaches through the bars and slams him into the wall. Again, our Cowboy attacks everyone in sight, disarming and knocking out seven deputies, until Very Beautiful Girl knocks him on the head and he passes out. As they’re talking, the Local Sheriff, a fine fellow who’s just locked up the Spoiled Kid, despite the inevitable wrath of the rich rancher-father, discovers that The Cowboy is a wanted criminal and tries to take him in to jail. She says, mysteriously, that she needs him, or needs to know what he knows or something, and he thinks she’s a whore. He goes into the local saloon and immediately attracts the attention of a Very Beautiful Girl (Olivia Wilde) with a gun on her hip and a thoroughly modern hairdo swinging down her back. So he kicks him in the crotch when the kid gets too close and calls it a day. After The Cowboy gets fixed up and talked to by the Wise Town Preacher (and surgeon?), he hears gunshots and witnesses the cattle rancher’s Spoiled, Worthless Son, drunk and belligerent, terrifying the townsfolk. Ours is not to wonder why.Īfter taking the now dead bad guys’ guns, hats, boots, horses and dog, the cowboy heads into the nearest town, a tiny, depressed former mining town, with one Rich Cattle Rancher (Harrison Ford) and little else going for it. It’s a scene decidedly reminiscent of the beginning of the Bourne films, where a lonely amnesiac is threatened and reveals heretofore unknown levels of bad-assery, though in the case of Cowboys and Aliens, we aren’t given an explanation for the super-human combat skills of the unknown cowboy. As one steps off his horse and starts pushing The Cowboy around with a gun, our hero (we assume) goes into super-fighter mode and kills all three Bad Guys with his bare hands. They talk, mockingly, amongst each other about the stranger on the ground, decide he’s an escaped convict, and that they’re going to take him in to town and get a reward.
As he’s trying to knock off the iron wrist thingy with a rock, three Bad Guys show up, all disgusting teeth, black clothes, and indian scalps hanging from their saddles. A hunky, filthy, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Cowboy (played by Daniel Craig) wakes up in the middle of nowhere with no hat, no gun, no memory, a serious wound in his side, a picture of a beautiful woman in his hand, and an odd iron shackle on one wrist. Turns out the movie delivers exactly what it indicated on its poster dirty, beefy cowboys and alien weapons. The movie opens on a wide-open desert. All I knew of the film was from the poster I’d seen on the side of a theater: a beefy, dirty, cowboy, jaw-clenched and turned away from the center of the poster, with a weird alien gun/bracelet on his wrist that was lighting up.
When I discovered that the plan was to go see Cowboys and Aliens, I was, um, hesitant. Saturday I went to the movies with my family.