earafat100
This is going to be spoiler-free review, so let me just say this movie is real bad. It's not even pleasing to look at. You;d think there would be some nice shots of the scenery since it is a pseudo-western film, but often times the camera is way too close to a person, colors are overly saturated or the contrast is too high. You would think with the premise of the wild west and aliens would be fun or exciting, but instead the fell flat and seemed joyless.
winopaul
Mixing two B-movie genres does not give you an A movie. It gives you a lousy B movie, if that. Pretty much a set-piece action-porn flick, but with a huge budget. I heard about this reading on Favreau's movie Chef, a much better use of your time and his money. I also read somewhere that Favreau was mad at some famous actor who dissed this movie when it came out, as if that could have really accounted for the flop. No, all of SAG praising this turkey would not have made it watchable.Because Hollywood types live in this make-believe netherworld they have no idea how real humans beings would behave. They also have little understanding of how aliens would behave. Here is a realistic re-write. Big alien ship lands in the desert. OK they start drilling for gold, lets allow that stupidity. The Indians are a little freaked. The aliens start grabbing up a few Indians to eat, mmmmmm red meat. Then as they scout around, they notice the giant cattle ranch. Cattle are way meatier than Indians so they take all the cattle and start eating them. This would actually provide some interesting dynamic, when the big-man-on-campus cattle baron has all his cattle taken away. Suddenly he has no wealth, no power, no jobs. Lets see how people treat him then. Now he might have a reason to go fight the aliens. He sure would have not risked his life for his milquetoast son.As the aliens quietly mine for gold and munch on cattle, the locals work themselves into a lather. The aliens don't have to abduct anyone to do anal probing, they know all they need to from the first few Indians they ate. Stick a giant claw into a human and he dies. Research complete. Let's eat.OK, OK, so the townspeople and Indians join together and attack the Alien spaceship. Since these creatures have the capacity for interstellar travel, they sure don't need to engage in hand-to-hand combat. No, they just zap every human in about 3 minutes and the humans are all dead. Also, since the Aliens have surely mastered genetics, they don't look like crude creepy turtle-people. They all look like TV newscasters, all of them. So with their chiseled features and great enunciation, slowly but surely the audience begins to sympathize with them, instead of those dirty townspeople or savage Indians.So by the time the movie ends, we are delighted the TV newscaster aliens have killed all the humans, eaten all the cattle, and taken all the gold. Based on this level of narcissism and rapaciousness, we will no doubt nominate them to political office where they can start wars to kill more humans and graft more gold.Roll credits.I once read that the writers of a situation comedy reach creative bankruptcy when they do the "amnesia episode". I agree, so that aspect has to go. Also the alien-as-pretty-girl trope. That way you don't get distracted for 12 minuets wondered "How the hell did she get here?!" It is already a completely ridiculous premise, so chopping up the timeline just makes it more confusing. Straighten out the timeline, like a good B-movie. Fire all the high-dollar actors. Replace Daniel Craig with some young teen idol. I don't know who that is these days, but like DeCaprio 20 years ago. One star, one big paycheck. Cut the casting budget. Five townspeople, five Indians, three aliens. No dogs or kids, its tough enough having horses on set.20 million budget, 85 million domestic gross. Plenty of action figure tie-ins. Maybe a ride at Universal Studios where you ride a mechanical horse up to the spaceship and then get tasered. Legal has to work out some kinks, but I think it would really go big. Anything would better than this movie, anything.(Special tip o' the hat to the programmers at IMDb who won't let me write B + B = B- in the title, since they think it is shouting.)
ThrillKillZ
Craig stars as Jake Lonergan, a stoic outlaw in Arizona sometime in the late 19th Century who wakes up with no memory and some metal device on his wrist. When he arrives in the town of Absolution, the sheriff discovers he's wanted and attempts to ship him off for a reward. That's when the aliens attack, bombing the town and roping up locals before flying off into the night. Lonergan's bracelet activates as a weapon and suddenly he's the only one capable of defeating these things. He joins a rescue party led by a grumpy Civil War vet named Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) and they all set off to find out what happened to their loved ones.The script introduces characters willy-nilly and provides little satisfactory explanation for anything that happens. The story paints Lonergan as a quiet badass, but one who has flashes of some woman he loved. Because his past slowly unravels with nothing revelatory to show for it as the film wears on, it's tough to care much or even see him as capable of romantic feelings. Regardless, a woman named Ella (Olivia Wilde) keeps approaching him with questions he doesn't have the answers to and she evolves into a love interest for nothing but the sake of it. Sam Rockwell has little to no bearing on the film other than serving an example of an otherwise peaceful man who will do whatever it takes to get his wife back. He's a waste in the role. As for Ford, he just gets on screen and acts grumpy and impatient. We've seen everyone on board do so much better. Did these folks not read the script? Probably not considering the number of drafts alone.
