I enjoy a good sassing, and generally, he brings it in spades. The Cowboys & Aliens panel was small this year though, just Favreau and one of the screenwriters, Roberto Orici (Star Trek, Alias, Hawaii 5-0), and the feeling emanating from him this year was less edge, more gratefulness. Intimate as a panel in a room that held the capacity of 300 could be, this year, I felt the love.
My swooning over Favreau aside, I am ready to see Cowboys & Aliens (but seriously Favreau, call me). There are a lot of shitty movies about cowboys, and an even longer list of crappy alien movies, but the reel alone that Fav put together for the Cowboys & Aliens panel made me a believer. I walked out feeling like I really got a feel for the characters, and it didn’t hurt that he threw in a few alien encounters, ending on a great shot of the alien itself. Nothing excites me more than a well-designed alien.
All of the actors have brought their A game, because that’s the only way they know how to play. You’ve got Sam Rockwell, whom, if you haven’t seen his performance in Moon, you don’t know how good two Sam Rockwells for the price of one can be. Olivia Wilde is a natural-born scene-stealer, but Daniel Craig (aka James Bond) gives her a run for her money. Honestly, I’ve never been impressed by Mr. Craig (I know, I know. I’m the only one) but in Cowboys & Aliens, he emotes some serious attitude. And of course, there’s Harrison Ford, whose name alone commands respect and awe in my book (and when his on-screen appearance drew cheers from the crowd, I understood that I am not alone in this thinking). Everything he has been in (minus Six Days & Seven Nights) has been his best.
Mr. Favreau said, ‘I want the excitement to come from just the juxtaposition of things,’ and with only nine minutes worth of footage, he did a decent job providing that. Well, a lot of excitement came from killing a crap load of aliens, too, but I won’t be picky.
Think Indiana Jones meets James Bond. With cowboy hats and six-shooters. And the actress who plays Thirteen on Fox’s House. And a battalion of high-powered producers (Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer, to name a few). And, of course, aliens. Put that all together, and what you’ve got is this summer’s highest-concept tentpole ‘ a sci-fi Western called Cowboys & Aliens.
Daniel Craig plays Jake Lonergan, a gunslinger in 1875 Arizona who wakes up in the desert with a mysterious shackle around his wrist and his memory wiped clean. When he wanders into a small pioneer town called Absolution, he runs into Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), an old enemy Lonergan doesn’t remember, and Olivia Wilde’s Ella, a beautiful gold digger ‘ as in, prospector. All three reluctantly join forces when aliens swoop in and start abducting townspeople. ”But they don’t know that they’re aliens,” explains director Jon Favreau, who passed on making a third Iron Man movie in part to do this estimated $100 million film. ”In the 1800s, nobody knows what aliens are. They think they’re demons.”
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This sort of genre mashing is pretty trendy these days. There’s a movie in the works based on that best-selling novel about Abraham Lincoln as a vampire hunter, as well as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But Cowboys & Aliens was actually way ahead of this pop culture curve. The premise and catchy title have been floating around Hollywood since Men in Black creator Scott Mitchell Rosenberg released a graphic novel called Cowboys & Aliens in 2006. ”We saw it on a list of old projects laying dormant in development and brought it to DreamWorks three years ago,” recalls Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote the script with Roberto Orci (they’re the team who helped J.J. Abrams reboot Star Trek). ”And it just so happened that the week we brought it to the studio, Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard were having lunch and talking about how they wanted to do a movie together.”
The idea that Kurtzman and Orci had seen on that old development list was more of a comedy in the Men in Black vein. What the writers ended up pitching ‘ and what caught Howard’s and Spielberg’s attention ‘ was a tonally deadpan thriller that addresses both the Western and alien genres on their own terms, without any winking. ”The key to the whole thing was not to have it play like camp,” says Orci, ”even if the title suggested camp.” However, Kurtzman adds, ”we didn’t want to lose the title. It was just too sticky.”
Originally, Robert Downey Jr. was attached to play Lonergan, but he dropped out because of a scheduling conflict with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, leaving the part open for Craig, who was looking for something to do while the next Bond movie was being sorted out. Ford came aboard later, thanks to some coaxing by his old Indy director, Steven Spielberg. ”We didn’t think he’d do it,” says Kurtzman. ”When Harrison’s agent called to say he was interested, we thought somebody was playing a joke.”
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Not surprisingly, Spielberg and Howard aimed their producing powers at different aspects of the story. ”I was more involved with the Western elements,” says Howard, who not only directed a Western (2003′s The Missing) but also starred in one (as a young actor, Howard rode alongside John Wayne in 1976′s The Shootist). ”I was the one pressing on the authenticity and plausibility of the West. And Steven ‘ nobody understands aliens and sci-fi quite the way he does.”