Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
August 17, 2019 10:13 PM - Subscribe

A spaceship arrives in Arizona, 1873, to take over the Earth, starting with the Wild West region. A posse of cowboys and natives are all that stand in their way.
posted by porpoise (8 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Clancy Brown, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Toby Huss, Walton Goggins, Richard Allan Jones - in addition to James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford - as a baddie).

The racism is... even more racist because they couldn't be bothered to do the racism period-appropriatly? That all the women characters die felt kinda weird, too.

The abductions are kind of silly, even for silly movies.

Counterpoint is the alien deliberately disrespecting honkey Indiana by communicating in Spanish to a native speaker.

... as long as one understands that this movie is intended to be a joke, it's a pretty darned fun one.

It's basically a similar end-plot as Outlander.

If you liked Critters, you might enjoy this if you have the patience.
posted by porpoise at 10:53 PM on August 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


This movie was in heavy rotation on cable for a while, and I found myself watching it many times over. Like, I know it's not a good movie, and, yeah, just such a collection of stereotypes/caricatures/racist tropes. But my impression when it hit cable was that it had been such an enormous financial flop and had gotten such terrible reviews, that I watched it first in curiosity expecting it to be unwatchably bad, and instead it was just fun-bad/low-expectations-good? (Kinda like I felt about John Carter.)
posted by oh yeah! at 7:34 AM on August 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


Infamously, the creator, came up with the name "Cowboys and Aliens", sold the film rights first, and then later hired people to write and draw the comic book.

He then bribed comic book retailers to order copies of the graphic novel below cost, to make it appear that the book was more popular than it was.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:02 AM on August 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


Huh! I hadn't heard about the bookseller bribe.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:15 AM on August 19, 2019




Not the worst film but considering the stellar cast, pretty underwhelming.
posted by octothorpe at 12:56 PM on August 19, 2019


I watched it, but all I remember is that ridiculously bad prop around Daniel Craig’s arm.
posted by valkane at 8:24 PM on August 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


it was like a Laserblast-bad prop.
posted by valkane at 8:26 PM on August 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


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