The Mandalorian and Grogu’s inability to make an impact at the box office has raised all sorts of questions. Is Star Wars no longer a tentpole franchise? What does its failure mean for franchise filmmaking as a whole? Why did all of Jeremy Allen White’s lines sound like they were recorded while he was half-asleep?
These are big questions, but we should have seen this debacle coming long before we started asking them. Sure, Star Wars has been overextending itself for years now, and the Mandalorian had become a character in search of a premise. But our analysis can go back much further, because 15 years ago, director Jon Favreau released a different space western with the same strengths and flaws.
Cowboys & Aliens featured a stacked cast for such a goofy premise, from Harrison Ford as a powerful rancher and a mid-Bond Daniel Craig as an amnesiac outlaw, to Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano, and Walton Goggins in various supporting roles. That wasn’t enough for it to avoid financial failure and a speedy slide into pop culture oblivion, but as the last big-budget movie Favreau directed before he became a Disney company man, it reveals a lot about how we got here.
Favreau was already being enveloped by the Marvel system in 2011, and whatever you think about the state of superhero movies today, his Iron Man was a shot in the arm to a genre that had become as stale as old yogurt. Now a victim of countless imitators, Iron Man felt fresh and exciting in 2008, and Favreau was the latest example of a creator successfully jumping from indie darling to big-budget maven. Naturally, a sequel followed, and while Favreau was working on Iron Man 2, he became intrigued by the long-gestating Cowboys & Aliens.
In Cowboys & Aliens, Daniel Craig wakes up with no memory and a strange shackle on his arm, and quickly establishes himself as a stoic ass-kicker. Self-interested, but with a remedial sense of right and wrong, he runs afoul of Ford after giving his drunken fail-son a long-overdue whooping. This inflames an already tense town, but right as things come to a head, UFOs shoot up the place and kidnap all the ancillary loved ones. Our ragtag heroes must therefore put aside their differences to, as Ford’s character says with clockwork regularity, “get our people back.”
Roger Ebert’s otherwise positive review lamented that Favreau didn’t just make a straight-up western, as there was more suspense in Craig’s amnesiac cowboy adventures than was present once the lasers started blasting. He wasn’t wrong, but, at the risk of indulging in hindsight bias, Cowboys & Aliens was proof that Favreau was always destined to be a franchise maker. Re-arrange a few pieces, and you could easily have a one-off Mando adventure or an MCU prequel.
That’s both a compliment and a damning indictment. There’s competent action, a handful of good gags, and a commitment from actors who really didn’t need to commit to a film called Cowboys & Aliens (Ford, in particular, seemed to enjoy himself, which is rarely a given). But the aliens, which are revealed to resemble 'roid-raging Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are underwhelming in both design and motivation, and there’s a self-seriousness to the whole affair that slowly chips away at your enthusiasm for watching it. Favreau was given the pulpiest premise this side of Calendar Man, and he treated it like he was making Unforgiven.
Basically, it feels a lot like The Mandalorian and Grogu, which passed on high-brow ideas like “themes” and “character growth” to focus on a cool guy doing cool guy things. There’s even a dog to fill Grogu’s role. And that’s fine if you’re making Cowboys & Aliens, which is practically the Platonic ideal of a movie decent enough to while away a plane ride. But when you’re shepherding the biggest franchise in human history, well, there’s conservative filmmaking, and then there’s somnambulant filmmaking. And when you watch Mando listlessly shuffle from plot point to plot point in desperate search of some of that old Iron Man magic, it’s like you’re watching Cowboys & Aliens with a hasty coat of Star Wars paint.
The big finale of Cowboys & Aliens, which sees our heroes sneak into the alien vessel, rescue their people, and blow the whole thing up with a desperate last-ditch assault on its core, shows why Favreau was trusted to do so much work for Disney and why, perhaps, he has taken Star Wars far as he can. Rewatched today, Cowboys & Aliens feels like a template for every blockbuster we’ve seen in the last 15 years. It’s distinct, and sometimes even quite fun. But it also makes you feel like we’ve become stuck in the old West.
Cowboys & Aliens is available on YouTube.
