THE GOOD: So we have a man named Lonergan (Daniel Craig) who wakes up in the desert with a nasty gaping hole in his side, and a weird iron bracelet on his wrist. He has no clue who he is or how he got there, but one thing that’s not in question is that he has fighting credentials. He can take out a whole group of armed cowboys with only a small amount of grunting. He eventually wanders into the nearby town of Absolution, where he finds himself unwelcomed by just about everyone but Ella (Olivia Wilde) who follows him around like a puppy and clearly starts to get on his nerves. He also has the pleasure of meeting Col. Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) who seems to be the one running the town, albeit not in a kind and orderly way. And then we have the real villains of the movie, the gargoyle/crablike creatures who are flying overhead and snatching people up with some sort of bungee cord and hauling them away for experimental surgeries. Lonergan, Dolarhyde and the rest of what’s left of the townspeople team up with the local Apaches to bring all this madness to an end. If only.
In fairness, Harrison Ford does an outstanding job of making you not like him, which is surprising because despite his usual cranky demeanor in most films, he is always able to pull off an underlying charmingness. For the majority of this film, he’s just mean, and you wish someone would just slap him upside the head. So, kudos to Mr. Ford for achieving that bad guy persona, and convincing you of its reality. On another positive note, the alien creatures were memorable and creepy. I’m still not sure, however, why we insist on aliens always looking like giant bugs. Is there NO chance that, if they exist, they don’t look just a LITTLE bit like a human? But I digress.
THE BAD: I can’t specifically point to the acting as being the downfall of this film, although Craig comes across as very mechanical and Olivia Wilde never seems to blink. For all intents and purposes, the cast works nicely, but it’s the very basis of the storyline that just doesn’t hold together for me. I realize of course that anything to do with Aliens is a far stretch from reality, and clearly this movie was meant to entertain, not to be a documentary. But I think when you have a cowboy jumping from a HORSE, onto a flying saucer to save the woman he is irritated by, maybe you have jumped that train from implausible to just plain silly. I literally laughed out loud at this part, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t meant to be funny.
THE UGLY: Given this all goes down in the wild west, there ARE some pretty gruesome lookers to be found–bathtubs were not abundant in these places. But clearly the ugly award goes to the outer space demons who hulk around when they walk, and run upside down on ceilings like spider monkeys when they really want to move. Again, I don’t mean to pound this into the ground, but let’s just TRY to envision alien beings as something other than giant insects who only want to dissect us and steal our resources. It’s getting old.
