Can We Try Cowboys And Sharks Next?

That would kind of rock. Or maybe Snakes on a Spaceship. I'm actually kind of enjoying the mashup movie playground, and to be honest, Cowboys and Aliens was, if somewhat derivative, at least not an actual fucking reboot. There were no Smurves, the A-Team did not show up, and Harrison Ford's character's kid was absolutely not Indiana Jones redux.

It's easy to get snotty about a movie called Cowboys And Aliens, but it was actually not a bad movie, and anyway, anyone who thought Firefly was fun needs to aim their contempt a little carefully.

The thing with the hat kept annoying me unreasonably though my partner did not notice it at all, and I honestly still don't know why, even after having it explained to me by the movie and by reviewers, the aliens were bothering to abduct people and experiment on them to find their weaknesses. Because on a planet with no sattelite technology, avoiding the humans would probably have been easy enough, and as far as I could tell the only reason anyone tried to fuck with the aliens at all was to get back the people they abducted. So, yeah, there was that, but a movie where the aliens come, mine gold from barren deserts, and disappear without a confrontation is probably pretty boring, so I'll give them a pass.

This is not necessarily a spoiler, but I will note that the aliens seem to take a fairly unsystematic approach to investigating the weaknesses of humans. After you've established that your disintegration ray disintegrates them, you may not need to start exploring the potential of The Pointy Stick. Disintegrating them kind of seems like you've solved your problem ("How can we get rid of these stupid human things?") and further messing about with poking holes in them seems like busywork.

The woman next to me appeared to have been unprepared for the possibility that there might be blood, and made louder-than-necessary "EEewewwYuuuuCK!!!!" noises every time someone got, you know, shot, or hit, or whatever. In her inner landscape, apparently, cowboys don't have guns, and she was apparently expecting them and the aliens to sit down and negotiate a settlement. Or maybe she stumbled into the wrong theater by mistake and spent an hour and a half wondering why they'd decided not to make them blue after all.

Almost everyone dies who you would expect to die, everyone lives who you would expect to live, the special effects were not terrible, and if you're plunking down fourteen bucks to see a movie called Cowboys and Aliens, you pretty much are getting what you are paying for and if you think it was a terrible movie but you were not paid to go see it, then you are an idiot because you cannot possibly have been expecting something else.

And I'm too lazy to look into it and see why this has suddenly become A Thing, but I would have found the "Depictions of characters smoking are not intended to make smoking look cool" end credits disclaimer somewhat less sad if there'd been an accompanying one about shooting people.