cowboys and aliens: what's not to love?

I was chomping at the bit to see this from the first moment I heard about it. Then it hit the cinemas and I chickened out. Not chickened out; I lost my faith, which is a different thing. I suffered an attack of accidie, perhaps the most insidious of the Seven Deadly Sins, and certainly the one to which I am most vulnerable.

I was already gun-shy of Jon Favreau after the Iron Man 2 debacle, and then the reviews were mostly in a scoffing or, at best, genial in a reluctant, embarrassed tone. Had I been feeling more myself I'd have known that it was the unabashed wallow in genre-crossing which was making the critics blush at their enjoyment of the thing. The same genre-shame used to happen back at the bookstore: people would come in, throw a mystery (or sci-fi, or horror) book on the counter and actually apologize for not buying something off the "serious lit" shelf. Again and again we would explain that there's at least as much brilliance on the genre shelves as there is sitting in stalwart arrogance on the "serious" shelf. Same thing, only Cowboys and Aliens is shamelessly indulging in two genres simultaneously, an exercise in fulsome opulence which makes me want to stand up and cheer. All is forgiven! Favreau has washed himself clean of the taints of skewed perspective and shiftless laxity which so ruined the second Iron Man film.

First of all, this cast is splendid. In practically every scene I was jumping up and down, recognizing an old favorite of whom I'd seen too little in recent times. Toby Huss! Keith Carradine! Walton Goggins, that shining genius from Justified! Paul Dano, giving us his best Jeremy Davies impression! Sam Rockwell, back in form! Clancy Brown in a perfect performance as an old West preacher! And, honestly, speaking as someone who's traditionally felt a sort of tepid benevolence rather than enthusiasm towards Harrison Ford even in my most zealous Star Wars days, who can't appreciate the beauty of his playing the Big-Bad-Black-Hat-Cattle-Baron who turns out to have a heart of gold?

Then there's Craig. Who doesn't love Daniel Craig? No one, that's who. If I was to host a Daniel Craig film festival in the privacy of my own home, I'd be watching roles as disparate as a lower-class police detective who falls for a lesbian in the Icehouse, an evil Jesuit in Elizabeth, Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen, Ted Hughes in Sylvia, and of course the guy with the martinis, shaken, not stirred. He also did, and this slipped beneath the range of most radar detectors, a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Nicole Kidman, Jeremy Northam, Jeffrey Wright and Veronica Cartwright, and that cast alone ought to send you running to your Netflix to give it a go.

Beyond the cast, the story is damn well told. The script has some lovely moments, like when Craig's Jake Lonnergan wakes amnesiac in the desert with a wound in his belly, and stumbles into Clancy Brown's Preacher's house to clean it.

Preacher: There's two kind of men get shot, criminals and victims.
Which are you?
Jake: I don't know.
Preacher: You got a name?
Jake: I don't know that either.
Preacher: What do you know?
Jake: English.

The photography is fine and unobtrusive to boot, and the editing is good. It leans pretty far out over that edge into the overblown side of things, but it's a spectacle, damnit, and it works well as such, far better, I'd say, than that last Indiana Jones thing. The story is simple, but with turns that keep you guessing, and characters well-developed with simple strokes. It's got many of the tropes you look for in Westerns, often playfully used to good effect: it's got a dog named Dog, for a start. It's got cattle-roping, except this time it's aliens roping humans from their passing ships. It's got the tenderfoot doctor who has to learn gunmanship and the honest sheriff at odds with a powerful rancher who has a no-good son.

And it's got the lonesome hero, haunted by his past. He rides in alone, faces some of his demons, makes the town a better place to live, then rides out alone into the desert. I tell you, it gives me shivers just pondering on it.