Adapted from an unused Obama campaign speech, Jon Favreau’s high-concept sci-fi/Western film sounds like the most preposterously unnecessary film ever made. “Cowboys fighting aliens” is a pitch which sounds good and terrible for the exact same reason, and the film fails to disappoint by being good in the most consistently terrible way imaginable. Aliens invade the familiar cinematic territory of the Wild West, and amnesiac outlaw Daniel Craig is the only one who can stop them (on account of mysteriously having an alien weapon attached to his wrist), along with Harrison Ford’s gruff cattleman, Sam Rockwell’s candy-ass bartender (who seems himself to have magically stepped into 1873 from the modern day), Olivia Wilde’s perennially imperiled affront to gender equality and, of course, the noble and fearless Apache tribe. The film culminates with a heroic U.S. Military intervention in Libya.
Words: Oisín Murphy
