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the big thing about Cowboys & Aliens was that like a decent amount of 2011 movies it got sort of caught in the middle? it didn't commit fully enough to its gimmick so all the folks who went to bat for Attack the Block or Rise of the Planet of the Apes didn't stan for it
this has all mainly come rushing back to me after stumbling on a college humor video the other day that was nothing but shitting on this movie for like 5 solid minutes, not even framed as a sketch just 5 minutes of the cast sitting in a fake theater razzing it
Cowboys & Aliens was mostly left paying for the sins of its creatives, people went into this thing pissed at the Lost guys who wrote it after that show's finale the year before & done with Olivia Wilde thanks to House being WELL passed the shark jumping moments
oh and let's not leave out Daniel Craig & Harrison Ford who were BOTH absolutely on the shit list in 2011, this was still 1 year before Skyfall actually SOLD everyone on Craig Bond and right in the middle of the Quantum of Solace "is this guy bad?" era
meanwhile Ford hadn't made a movie in like FOREVER and his grumpy "get a fucking life nerds" persona was chaffing EXTREMELY hard at this point, remember this was the era when a Star Wars dance game making a joke about Han Solo/Jason Derulo's Solo was unacceptable
finally piled onto all of that were the last dregs of the "adult blockbuster" scene from the 2000s, of which Cowboys & Aliens felt like it wanted to sort of split the difference?
see back in the short decade everyone was really uptight after 9/11 so there was this insistence that action-blockbusters had to be dour & serious & "adult" which sometimes worked sometimes didn't, stuff like Bourne trilogy, King Arthur, War of the Worlds, Casino Royale
the thing is, this era was ENDING by the time you hit 2011? Thor & Captain America & X-Men: First Class were all precursors of the kind of blockbusters we were about to start getting so Cowboys & Aliens felt kind of...regressive?
it FELT like the movie wanted to drag us backwards to an era we were quickly leaving behind, THAT'S why stuff like Attack the Block, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, even Real Steel found a legitimate fan base, they still felt like the world that was coming
Cowboys & Aliens was left in this neutral zone, not goofy ENOUGH to sell itself to the blossoming MCU audience, too goofy to sell itself to sell itself to people who saw themselves as above that material
