Cowboys & Aliens

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Should you rent it?

Yes. It's quite entertaining.

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Spoiler free review.

For some reason I postponed watching this movie for a long time. I love science fiction movies but I consider this movie not science fiction but SciFi... This is probably not an official differentiation but that's how I do it: movies with both science and fiction I call them science fiction. And then the movies about space, aliens, time travel and other topics often refer to in science fiction movies but without any good science I call SciFi. Here's an easy way to differentiate: if they never try to explain how the things happens or they give a bad shallow explanation: it's a SciFi flick.

So if you haven't seen any of these science fiction movies, do it soon: Gattaca, Star Wars, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Total Recall, Contact...

BTW... I even consider science fiction some technically SciFi movies like The 6th Day because they at least imagine a different way in which some common day appliances would work in the future.

But back to Cowboys & Aliens: I was saying that I postponed watching this movie because the mixture of cowboys and aliens sounds a lot like SciFi (fiction but not science) and it doesn't make a lot of sense since, if you agree aliens as legitimate science fiction material, why not in the days of the old west? It may have more to do with the fact that I don't believe aliens have ever visited us and that they surely must exist but very very far away with no real way to reach here considering even the closest starts are light years away and that mass cannot really reach light speeds... unless Higg's field can be manipulated to... I think I digress again :)

But the movie is good. Daniel Craig is an amazingly badass cowboy (and to think I didn't like the idea of him becoming James Bond before that movie came out) and Harrison Ford is kind of a cute badass... like a puppy that you're supposed to be afraid of but just can't. Olivia Wilde is sexy as hell even with the unrevealing dresses she wears all the time.

Obviously it's not an eye opening movie with a deep message, it's just an action film with, well, cowboys & aliens. And they even bothered to show you what the aliens look like (unlike Contact by the way). The thing is: I was really enjoying the cowboys movie and the aliens kind of ruined it for me. I wish the "monsters" would've been something else and it could have become more than an action flick... something closer to the great movie I consider 3:10 to Yuma to be (if you haven't seen that one... leave work right now and head to blockbuster... I said now!).

So, a popcorn worthy movie that luckily spends most of the time on the cowboys and with good visual effects... go rent.