★
This is easily the worst movie I’ve seen all summer. The film has all the elements of the western – Indians, canyons, the loner, the landowner, the bad guys – and uses them to no effect. You don’t really like or dislike anyone because they’re all just ciphers, nor are you surprised by their typical western actions. Speed ahead to the aliens, and there are no surprises there either. Think of the beasts in War of the Worlds. This movie is more a show-and-tell than an engaging film. It’s like everyone in the movie is modeling their characters instead of inhabiting them, but that’s because the characters are shallow clichés rather than characters.
The sci-fi/western mash-up is a fine idea, but Favreau misses here what J.J. Abrams gets right in Super 8. Like Favreau, Abrams quotes extensively from a list of pre-existing elements (Spielberg’s cinema vocabulary), but Abrams does more than quote: he uses the elements to create a film with freshness, life and engagement. Fabreau, instead, just marches out a type like the loner and marches him off as if to show him but not to use him to engage the audience.
I like the idea of mixing different period and genres, even mixing alternate versions of historical periods. That can work in films like the recent Sherlock Holmes, and the upcoming Three Musketeers looks to have potential. But a film like that has have more than show-and-tell going for it, or it will turn into a list of predictable characters doing predictable things, like Cowboys and Aliens.
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