I’m somewhere between skeptical and cautiously optimistic when it comes to Jon Favreau’s COWBOYS AND ALIENS. I’ve dug elements from the teaser and the recent Superbowl commercial, but I’m definitely not completely sold. The movie aims to strike a balance between sci-fi and western – and between being serious and self-aware – which is a big old mountain to climb from where I sit…
Making things even fuzzier, it turns out there might be more toying with the genres than we were initially aware of. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Favreau explains that the material will verge into territory much darker than just sci-fi/fantasy:
“We wanted to maintain the integrity of both genres, and focus on a specific aspect of the alien genre which mostly revolves around the films of the ’80s that I grew up with, and I’m lucky enough to be working with [Steven] Spielberg [the Cowboys & Aliens exec producer], who was the author of many of the films we’re using as inspiration. And sometimes it’s fun to play things as thriller, sometimes verging on horror, like Alien or Aliens. We wanted to maintain that gravity.”
I like reading that. I don’t know if the director is just saying what we want to hear (he does seem quite adept at handling the fanboy crowd) or if there’s really some scary stuff going down in the flick, but consider me more intrigued than ever… For the full interview with Favreau, click HERE.
COWBOYS AND ALIENS hits theaters on JULY 29th.
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