In the “Making Of” video for this movie, the creators of Cowboys and Aliens talk about how there aren’t really any stories out there that combine the Old West with Science Fiction. I suppose they’ve never seen Serenity, then. [Or, hell, Wild, Wild West. Back to the Future, Part III. Read Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Etc. – Ed.] Too bad for them. However, I will give them credit: rather than be simply a sci-fi western, this is a “what if” for technology. What would have happened if aliens came down to attack us while we still only had basic weaponry to fight with?

The story starts out as Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) awakens in the New Mexico desert with no memory, a gunshot wound, and a weird meal handcuff on his wrist. After beating up some bounty hunters, he makes his way to the town of Absolution, where the local preacher treats him for his wound. He causes a ruckus with a big name rancher’s son, Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), causing Percy to shoot a deputy and get locked up. The sheriff (Keith Carradine) also recognizes Jake as an outlaw and arrests him as well.

Just as the big name rancher, Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) comes to town to demand his son back, as well as the outlaw who stole his gold -- this happens to be Jake -- everyone sees lights coming in from space. The plot is tense at this point, so people ignore it until suddenly space ships fill the sky and blow things up. They also scoop people from the ground into the sky, much like a human would wrangle cattle. Jake’s metal bracelet turns into a powerful weapon and seems to be the only thing that can take the alien ships down. At this point, no one knows what to think, and they all forget the plot and begin to see that they’ll need to band together.

What I liked is how this was just a basic Western up until this point. Sure, there was an amnesiac with fancy jewelry, but it all played out as the standard Stranger who comes into town and upsets the Townsfolk. There are even posses, powerful ranchers, and other tropes that have been around since there were Westerns in the first place. And then… BAM. Although I knew, from the title, that there would be aliens coming into this movie, I think the writing did a good job of lulling me into a Western frame of mind before it hit me with sci-fi nuttiness.

The posse sets out with Jake, the Deputy’s grandson, Dolarhyde and his men, and a mysterious woman named Elle (Olivia Wilde). Jake runs off to have a flashback of being abducted by the aliens (who would have ever guessed after seeing that bracelet at work?), but he comes back to help with the search for the abducted townsfolk. Along the way, the aliens sort of follow them, picking off people here and there. There is also a run-in with Jake’s gang. Apparently, Jake wasn’t good to them either, he was responsible stealing the loot from a robbery and running off. As Jake and Ella run to escape the gang, the aliens attack again, this time taking Ella. Jake manages to save her from death by the aliens, but they are too injured and far away from care. When Jake reaches the others, Ella is dead.

At this point, as if things couldn’t get worse, they are taken by a group of Chiricahua Apaches, who believe that the settlers are responsible for the attacks. Hell, with the US track record towards Native Americans, who can blame them? At least the aliens don’t have smallpox-infested blankets. However, as they go to cremate Ella, she is resurrected and transforms back into her body. She explains that she’s a traveler from another planet that was subjugated by these aliens. She came to Earth to make sure that these aliens couldn’t destroy another planet again. She also reveals the alien plot: to take Earth’s gold and to kill or enslave all the people on Earth. Frankly, it sounds like Europe’s plan for the New World, so that this is happening in a place and time where white settlers were doing the same thing to Native Americans is ironic to say the least. Too bad the natives at Plymouth Rock didn’t have an Ella.

Ella thinks that Jake holds the key to finding the aliens’ base of operations. Once they take that out, it will prove to them that Earth isn’t worth exploring. Furthermore, Jake is the person who can do the most damage with his wrist gear. To get his memory back, Jake drinks some medicinal brew before hallucinating and then getting his memory back. Armed with his new memories, Jake leads them all to the mothership, where they battle it out at last over the aliens. Go Humans!

I’m sure that there will be man reviews out there praising this movie. It was good, it had an appropriate blend of action, mystery and Daniel Craig. Harrison Ford was strong, and in a role he hasn’t taken in years: relatively unlikeable until the end. I thought everyone ran with what they were given and did it well. What stood out to me was the irony of the film itself; I found it fascinating, the way that it put the dominant Eurocentric invader culture of America at the time on the defensive, and tried to explain to them how it might have felt to be on the other side of history, on the side of the conquered peoples. In history classes, we hear about how the Spanish conquered the Incas and Aztecs for their gold, and the only story told in that scenario is that of the conquerors. But that story is also played out here: another culture with superior technology and knowledge has invaded. How do you fight? In this version, of course, the cowboys win because we want humanity to be victors over those that would exterminate us. Of course, for the alternative, more realistic ending, we would look to the real history of the New World, rather than this fictionalized one. In the real world, the culture with better weapons wins the gold and exterminates the natives.

This is a romanticized view of what could have happened. What I find odd about the movie was that this was done with seemingly no self-reflection. The artistic choice -- dictated by the original comics -- to have settlers and American Indians band together against the aliens is appropriate, but there was no explicit awareness on the settlers’ part, here, that they were in effect invading aliens, as well. We were left to make the inference on our own. Whether this was an unconscious challenge from the filmmakers or a complete missing of the point, I don’t know, but I think that even a brief acknowledgement, or even accusation, of this could have made this movie so much more interesting than yet another sci-fi western.

Of which there have been a few before this, despite what the creators say.

   -- Sara Paige