ComplainerMan

What do you get when you mix two genres, 20 gimmicks from past movies and a semi-star-studded cast. Poop Soup! That really stinks. This movie started off well enough as a Western, or at least you could see potential in the first 1/2 hour. Then the seams started to show in Daniel Craig’s accent and performance. Unless he was trying to portray an anal retentive cowboy outlaw with no personality. The fitted clothing and a cowboy hat with a touch of Austrian mountain guide panache made the awkwardness complete.

Olivia Wilde didn’t screw up here role as the odd, bra-less female gunslinger/transient whose presence in each scene is an enigma, and who is actually an alien and gets nude. Harrison Ford started off playing a slightly different character than he does in every other movie he is in, but slipped back into “the Harrison Ford thing” by the end of the movie. Sam Rockwell simply couldn’t rise above the material.

What started off as a trite and slightly off-tempo western quickly became a lame science fiction flick that tried too hard. The CGI aliens were some of the most inexplicable creatures I’ve ever scene in a movie. These guys were large, muscular, reptilian monsters that could run like cheetahs and either run you through with their fingernails or bite you in the neck.  They could also run up walls. Rock faces… not so much. They had to walk around the path like a regular guy to get the people up on the rocks.  They were apparently not able to function too well in the light.  Such advanced space-faring creatures could have at least invented sunglasses. Once they got into the light though, they didn’t appear to need them. In fact I think the director forgot about the whole “not so good in the light” thing for those scenes.

The lamest part of the aliens were their chests. If they had a person down, and didn’t feel like biting their neck or running them through with their fingernails, their chest would open up and a pair of gooey hands would come out of their guts and fondle their victim’s face. Gross! If their prey wasn’t completely disgusted into a state a paralysis, however, the would-be victim could just stab their alien attacker in their exposed internal organs. One poke was enough to instantly kill the hastily-designed creature.

So after almost two hours of painful plot and dialog, Olivia Wilde’s character turns suicide bomber and destroys the mother ship. “Thank god!” I thought. This movie is finally over.