Cowboys & Aliens

There have been many Westerns that start the way Cowboys & Aliens did, with a stranger coming into town, clouded in mystery, is he good, is he bad, is he going to save the town, or is he going to make things worse. Slowly the stranger begins to bond with the townspeople, and like many westerns or even samurai films before it, after an attack on the town, the stranger along with a posse begin to defend the town from the attacking force. That however only covers the "Cowboy" part, because as it turns out the attacking force (as if the title doesn't give it away) is Aliens, giving  the movie an unique twist, that I've never seen before, I say "I" because I'm sure there has been some B-Rate bobo movie that has crossed these two genres before, not nearly as effectively I'm sure.

After a large attack on the town in which several people were taken by the the aliens, Jake Lonergan (played really well by Daniel Craig, channelling his inner-Jason Bourne) along with Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde) Woodrow Dolarhyde (an energetic Harrison Ford), Doc (Sam Rockwell) The Deputy (Brian Duffy) among others form a posse to find the aliens and free their loved ones. Along the way the group encounters trouble from another alien attack, a group of Bandits, which as it turns out Jake Lonergan was formerly the leader of, and a group of Indians. That's pretty much the just of the story, like many Westerns the story isn't extremely complex, there aren't a ton of side stories and subplots, the big surprise with this movie was that it wasn't Story Driven or even Special Effects Driven, but Character Driven, a rather surprise twist itself in terms of Summer Movies.

Cowboys & Aliens was directed by Jon Favreau, who is Supremely Underrated, while his movies always make money, he isn't given the credit for how well he blends story, characters, and effects. Everyone knows the movies he's directed, Iron Man 1 and 2, Elf, Zathura, and even his lesser known movies are quality like Made and he also wrote the great Swingers, and he hits again with Cowboys & Aliens, many people thought this would be a new concept, but it really isn't, its more than that, its a new take on a story thats been told many times before, while it may start the same as several movies that came before it definitely doesn't end the way those movies did.