For the first time since I started work this summer, I went to the movies at midnight on a Thursday night to see the opening of a newly released movie. There have been a good number of really good movies this summer-- Harry Potter was disappointing, but the new X-Men was very good, I really enjoyed Super 8, and Horrible Bosses was hilarious. But last night, right before my last day of work, I went to see Cowboys and Aliens. Why? Because Cowboys and Aliens are awesome. Individually, they're awesome. Combined, they're... more awesome than if you add them together. If Cowboys have 10 awesome points, and Aliens have another 10 awesome points, Cowboys AND Aliens have 25 awesome points.
So I guess the first place to start is with some plot points. There are some SPOILERS HERE just in case someone would get upset about it. But really, this is Cowboys and Aliens, not an M. Night Shyamalan movie. There are a lot of cowboys and aliens and explosions, just like you see in the previews, plus some things that are also awesome but aren't advertised in the trailer (Native Americans!). So the plot: James Bond wakes up in the desert a few years after the Civil War in the Wild Wild West with a metal bracelet strapped to his arm. He doesn't remember anything (besides how to speak English). He rolls up to town, where Han Solo has a son who is being a giant prick. Also, his son is the preacher who Daniel Day-Lewis lays out to dry in There Will Be Blood, except now he's taller and has the kind of facial hair semi-pubescent 13-year olds who don't know how to shave grow. James Bond proceeds to repeatedly kick him in the nuts for the next half of the movie. It's awesome.
When he gets to town, it's full of posters of James Bond, who is apparently wanted for everything. So the sheriff and his boys come after him and want to send him away. They also want to send away Han's son because, again, no one likes 26-year-old pricks who can't grow real facial hair. The only other person interested in James Bond is Olivia Wilde. You don't really have any clue who she is, what she does, or why the baddest woman in 19th century America (or 20th century America. Or of all time, really) is chasing James Bond around like a hound dog. Especially when he spends the first half of the movie telling her to bounce. I spent the first half of the movie thinking they were both aliens, her because, even though Bond beat up on all of the town's police, she cold-cocked him with one punch, and him because he had without a doubt the most beautiful woman in America chasing him around, but acted like he just wasn't interested at all. It might've made sense if he was gay, but flashbacks made clear that he wasn't. But, just as Bond and Han's useless prick son are about to get carted away, the aliens show up. They shoot a few people, snatch a few others (including Han's son and the bartender's mail-order bride) and bolt. In the process we figure out that Bond's metal bracelet is actually a super-gat that can take out the alien spaceships. At which point I'm definitely kind of thinking he's a different kind of alien. But the rest of the movie is more or less spent figuring out who he is, who Olivia Wilde is, and why she's so desperate to kick it with him.
We would be figuring out what the aliens want, but (and this is the best part), it's really not that complicated at all. They're desperate for gold. Yeah, the big bad scary aliens are a bunch of Glenn Becks who scour the universe snatching everyone's gold because alien Ben Bernanke is apparently printing too much alien money for the aliens' good. Long story short, there's a bunch of fighting (where the cowboys really don't bring much to the table, bu the Native Americans do serious work), and everything ends.
Long story short, it's a cinematic masterpiece because: 1) Cowboys, 2) Aliens, 3) Native Americans, 4-25) Olivia Wilde.
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