#Cowboys and aliens 2011 free#
Sci-fi, on the other hand, is able to create a new consciousness involving the free play of intellect in a self-defining milieu of infinite pliability. The western is earthbound and circumscribed, its province the simpler, traditional moral concerns of man. Some, of course, think that in their purest forms the western and science fiction are at once complementary and antithetical. Science fiction has usually engaged with the western by transposing familiar plots from the old frontier of the west to the new frontier of space, as in the reworking of High Noon as Outland, with Sean Connery as an isolated sheriff on a grim planet, and The Magnificent Seven exchanging their horses for spacecraft in Battle Beyond the Stars, where Robert Vaughn reprises his earlier role. More recently, in Grim Prairie Tales (1990), Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones played two wayfarers who, wary of being murdered by each other should they sleep, keep themselves awake all night at a campfire by telling hair-raising supernatural stories involving Native Americans and settlers. The veteran B-movie specialist William Beaudine (in his day, Hollywood's oldest working director) brought gothic horror to the horse opera in the form of Billy the Kid vs Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, both made in 1966, while the celebrated special-effects expert Ray Harryhausen worked on The Valley of Gwangi, in which cowboys accompanied Edwardian scientists on a search for prehistoric monsters in Mexico.
The now moribund western has been an infinitely receptive genre, capable of turning The Iliad into a Texas range war and The Tempest into a tale of marooned outlaws, and of accommodating almost anything that's in the air, from ecology to juvenile delinquency.
#Cowboys and aliens 2011 movie#
The western is self-evidently the host genre, but the movie might well have linked several familiar franchises by calling itself James Bond and Indiana Jones vs the Alien Predators. They play a couple of gun-toting hardmen in post-civil war New Mexico territory, the stamping ground of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, who have somewhat alarmingly close encounters of the third kind with extraterrestrials. Among the dozen or so listed producers are a pair of directors – Steven Spielberg, who has been behind a string of sci-fi movies, and Ron Howard, who has made two ambitious westerns, one rather good, the other a distinct failure.īased (not surprisingly) on a graphic novel, the picture stars Daniel Craig, a stranger both to the west and to sci-fi, and Harrison Ford, who made his name in the Star Wars movies but came a cropper with his only big-screen western. United against a common enemy, they will prepare for an epic showdown for survival.I n all the advertising for Jon Favreau's blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens, the latter element of the provocative title is presented in larger type, thus suggesting the current ascendancy of one genre over the other. With the help of the elusive traveler Ella (Olivia Wilde), he pulls together a posse comprised of former opponents-townsfolk, Dolarhyde and his boys, outlaws and Apache warriors-all in danger of annihilation. As this gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he's been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against the alien force. Now, the stranger they rejected is their only hope for salvation. Screaming down with breathtaking velocity and blinding lights to abduct the helpless one by one, these monsters challenge everything the residents have ever known. But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky. What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don't welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde (Ford). The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. A stranger with no memory of his past stumbles into the hard desert town of Absolution. where a lone cowboy leads an uprising against a terror from beyond our world.