Cowboys & Aliens

I believe in comparing a movie to a dish and the director to its chef. There are world renowned chefs and there are aspirants with promising talents. And then there are those who are neither here nor there – the “middlemen” if you can call them that. Leaders, Aspirants and Followers.

So, there are leaders like James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, John Lasseter, etc, and there are worthy aspirants like Zack Snyder, Paul Greengrass, Danny Boyle, etc. These master craftsmen don’t follow a “trend”. More often than not, they define and build an era. And then there are people like John Favreau, Michael Bay, etc., who are proficient followers of those trends. James Cameron is what he is because he invents the recipes of his dishes. Even if you don’t love the dish, you most certainly will not hate it; and you cannot help but be amazed at the brilliance of the recipe and its ingredients. The aspirants are more inspired by the passion that goes behind the invention of such recipes than the recipes themselves. Which is why some of their initial attempts may founder but eventually they are guaranteed to join that altar where their works are beyond success and failure. The followers, on the other hand, are more interested in acquainting themselves with the ingredients used by the leaders and the aspirants. Just a mish-mash of different ingredients from different recipes and –voila – you get a movie like Cowboys and Aliens.

Faint and few streaks of genius intertwined with blunting performances further marred by blotches of déjà-vu is how I would define C&A. Oh, who would have expected Harrison Ford to choose C&A as one of his now-a-days rare silver screen appearances! And I constantly fail to understand why Daniel Craig literally sweats incessantly for his one-expression-fits-all acting prowess in every single movie. Dude, lose the drive to make yourself look cool. You remind me of SRK – that’s how pathetic you are on screen.

If Iron Man2 was a small step towards the abyss of self-annihilation for John F, C&A is one giant leap toward the same. After the well deserving debacle of Iron Man 2, John F takes another futile swing at the action + sci-fi genre, thus sealing the fact that he is better off acting than directing. The plot is straight out of a Hollywood studio blender; the alien creature VFX are Cameron’s Aliens meets District 9, and even the bonny Olivia Wilde looks like she just woke up with a horrible hang over - completely out of place.

Seriously, borrowing the “unobtanium-obsessed humans invading Pandora” plot and shockingly downgrading it to “gold-obsessed aliens invading earth” is freakishly infantile. Movies that lulled me to sleep are far and very few. C&A has joined that distinguished club – I found myself making an effort to stay awake at least a couple of times during the boring, long and “made to look and sound cool” cowboy conversations. While I agree that trying to copy the minutiae-obsessed but intensely grossing conversation styles of Quentin’s movies is not an easy job, I also despise anyone failing so poorly.

All said and done, you can’t help but sympathize with John F because the leaders have set the bar so high – you either die trying or live long enough to see yourself become a pitiful parody. If you are a teenager or have a teenager who is trying to make himself popular with his knowledge of movies, watch this movie for the numerous proofs it provides of how not to make a movie of this genre. Otherwise, you are well off giving it a skip and watching it at home whenever it is aired on TV.