Directed by: Jon Favreau
Rating: I Didn't Like It
So, the basic story is this. A cowboy wakes up in the middle of the desert with a strange bracelet of some kind on his wrist. He wanders into town and is soon recognized as a man wanted for robbery and murder among other things. The problem is that he has no memory of it, and as his memory returns a little at a time, we learn that me may or may not have committed the crimes alleged against him. Oh, yeah, he has to help save the world from an alien invasion, too; that's all part of the bracelet mystery.
Before I go any further into this, I need to clarify that I have not read the source material for this movie. I've never even seen the graphic novel on which it's based on the shelf at the store. Needless to say, I won't be making any comparisons of the movie to the graphic novel.
The Good:
- The first thing I really liked about the movie was the alien design. It's very hard for us as a species to imagine aliens that aren't bipedal, upright creatures with a head and a face based mainly like ours. These creatures were a little different in that their chest cavity opens to reveal a second pair of arms. The catch is that it also reveals some of their internal organs.
- Adam Beach had a stint on "Law & Order: SVU", and I'm a big fan of that show. It was cool to see him in something else, and he did an alright job with the role in which he was cast.
- All the CG was good, but with a budget like this film had, it should've been.
- Rockwell delivered as always. He's a great actor, and he should get more major roles.
- Also, I liked Clancy Brown's role quite a bit, too. He doesn't get enough roles period.
The Bad:
- The dialogue wasn't all that great. A lot of it was cliche.
- There's a whole "making the character more relatable to the audience" bit with Ford's character and a kid in the movie that's searching for his grandfather. It was really cliche.
- In general, why has Ford adopted this guttural, grunty type of voice? He didn't used to sound like that. I used to be able to understand the words he said.
- It's a shame we didn't get to see more of Keith Carradine. He played Frank Lundy in the Dexter TV series, as well as several other awesome characters on TV. He wasn't in the movie for very long, being abducted early on in the film.
The Ugly
- With a movie like this where there are so many major players involved - Ron Howard, Steve Spielberg, Favreau, Ford, Craig, you would expect big, big things. I didn't really feel like this one was as good as it should've been. I mean, Favreau directed the first two Iron Man films. Howard is responsible for films like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. I don't need to go over Spielberg's filmography, and on top of all of that backbone, you've got Han Solo and James Bone facing off together against aliens. How could that not be an awesome film?
I can't say this is the worst sci-fi I've ever seen, not by far. On the other hand, it's probably the most disappointing movie I've seen in a while. Also, it's by far the worst movie I've ever seen where cowboys went toe to toe with aliens.
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