#Cowboys and aliens (2011) movie#
The western is self-evidently the host genre, but the movie might well have linked several familiar franchises by calling itself James Bond and Indiana Jones vs the Alien Predators. They play a couple of gun-toting hardmen in post-civil war New Mexico territory, the stamping ground of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, who have somewhat alarmingly close encounters of the third kind with extraterrestrials.
Among the dozen or so listed producers are a pair of directors – Steven Spielberg, who has been behind a string of sci-fi movies, and Ron Howard, who has made two ambitious westerns, one rather good, the other a distinct failure.īased (not surprisingly) on a graphic novel, the picture stars Daniel Craig, a stranger both to the west and to sci-fi, and Harrison Ford, who made his name in the Star Wars movies but came a cropper with his only big-screen western. I n all the advertising for Jon Favreau's blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens, the latter element of the provocative title is presented in larger type, thus suggesting the current ascendancy of one genre over the other.