Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect Jon Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens to live up to its nutty high concept, but as the flaccid, soulless, festering end product stands now, it’s a testament to a complete waste of limitless potential and a rock-solid cast, not to mention 165 million dollars. That obscene budget doesn’t factor in the costs of a supersaturation ad campaign or all the overtime paid to the overworked, sleep deprived ILM techies slaving away at computer consoles running the latest version of Maya, rendering photorealistic, goopy CGI extraterrestrials for months on end in order to meet an impossible deadline. While the film convincingly masquerades as a generic Acid Western for the first reel and a half,  CGI overload soon kicks in, ever escalating toward a migraine-inducing, incomprehensible, clangorous third act filled with plot conveniences, deus-ex-machina rescues, cringeworthy attempts at humor, and laughably half-assed grasping at some kind of underlying moral to the whole agonizing mess. What else would you expect from the brain trust behind the Transformers trilogy and the insipid Iron Man saga? At the same time it is kind of fascinating as a singular piece of cultural detritus, an inexplicable fusion of 1970s New Hollywood cynicism with the mind-numbing spectacle of today.

We start conventionally enough with Daniel Craig, the mysterious rugged stranger and requisite Man with No Name, awakening in the desert with amnesia, a nonfatal thorax wound, and a bizarre electronic doodad affixed to his wrist. After dispatching a trio of filthy scalphunters, he makes his way to the ironically named cookie-cutter hamlet of Absolution, and within minutes is getting some topnotch frontier surgery from drunken doctor/priest Clancy Brown, which is interrupted by gunfire from the official Town Miscreant, a delightfully weaselly Paul Dano. Turns out he’s been extorting booze from meek barkeep Sam Rockwell by bullying-by-proxy with threats of retribution from his Paw, a local livestock baron, Civil War veteran and all-purpose surly rich asshole named Dollarhyde (surely a reference to the psychotic Tooth Fairy from Red Dragon). If you’re keeping count of all the Western cliches, you’ve already used up all ten of your fingers by now and are starting to count with your toes; keep in mind we aren’t even into the second reel yet.

Right on schedule, Craig asserts his dominance and disables a petulant Dano without uncrossing his arms, enabling the grizzled yet kindly town Sheriff (a nigh-unrecognizable Keith Carradine) to throw the shrimp into lockup. But wouldn’t you know it, turns out our ostensible hero is a wanted outlaw named Jake Lonergan, boasting a list of offenses longer than a cattle drive and enough stolen loot to his name to fill a Conestoga wagon. Needless to say, our protagonist barely has enough time to knock back a couple complementary shots of whiskey, and reject the rather aggressive advances of fair maiden Olivia Wilde (née Cockburn) before Carradine and his deputies stride in and get manhandled by the hesitantly badass hero. Apropos enough, since he rejects the lady’s advances for no reason other than his boilerplate Reluctant Protagonist Beat Sheet demands it, she knocks him out with the butt of a long rifle for no reason other than the necessity of the Act 2 Plot Point.

Rounding out the roster of Western stock characters is Harrison Ford as the one-dimensional Dollarhyde; though his dramatic introduction is meant to be both a knowing wink at the audience and a surprise reveal, the shock of seeing Ford’s craggy visage and hearing his snarling gravelly voice will be spoiled considerably by anyone who’s been exposed to the film’s relentless ad campaign. Ford is introduced during a very strange, brutal sequence in which he tortures a a helpless flunky by stretching him between two opposite-facing horses, while accusing him of “blowing up my cattle”; natch, he refuses to believe the flunky’s truthful assertion that aliens fired an explosive pulse at him and his fellow cowhands, and fixates on the cockamamie idea that the flunky somehow gets off on exploding his boss’s livestock (and fellow cowhands).

He’s fixing to re-enact a certain scene from The Hitcher when he gets word that Dano’s in the pokey; instead of pulling him in twain, he cuts one of the ropes and sends the lead horse away at full gallop, presumably dragging the flunky over miles of rough terrain to a prolonged, painful demise. Of course the screenplay by Michael Bay whores Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci doesn’t bother to delve into Dollarhyde’s terrifying character (or even check back on his poor innocent flunky), because he’s merely a stick figure existing for the sole reason of driving the horseshit plot forward. He doesn’t even have time to develop as an antagonist because soon, oh so very soon, the horseshit’s about to hit the cotton gin fan.

For those of you still following along, the rest of this review will be dissecting the disastrous third act of Cowboys and Aliens, so if you must see this, and must be unaware of the retarded “surprises” in store, bully for you. Stop reading after this short ‘graph. Take my advice and bring along a fifth of whiskey, mix it with a giant 44 ounce soft drink, and take a swig for every Western Cliche, and take an extra long drink every time someone says the word “demons”. Good luck and Godspeed.

Now that we’re free to discuss the entirety of Kurtzman and Orci’s birdcage lining screenplay, let’s start by spoiling the obvious: Those Fucking Aliens.

Who are they? What are they? Where did they come from? Even when everything’s explained in a boring, massive, unimaginative and interminable  exposition dump, the answers to these basic questions are still frustratingly oblique. One thing we do know beyond the shadow of a doubt is that they time all their attacks with clockwork precision. No sooner than Ford and his torch-bearing army of thugs are confronting mellow, peace-loving Sheriff Carradine as he loads the two shackled prisoners into the stagecoach, and the plot is threatening to become interesting, those damned aliens show up and begin decimating the Greater Absolution Metropolitan Area. Then, in the first of many lazy plot conveniences, Lonergan’s mechanical wrist bracelet begins whirring and beeping and blooping and projecting holographic readouts; for some reason Craig acts stoic and kind of bored when this magical plot device begins doing its witchcraft. Within seconds he’s blasted himself out of the stage, broken Dano’s arm, and shot down an alien spacecraft in as blase a manner as humanly possible; meanwhile all manner of townsfolk are being lassoed by these ships and yanked violently into the air, turning them into CGI stunt doubles in the blink of an eye.

Presumably because it would involve logical leaps too extreme for even this script to solve with some psuedoscientific quasi-mystical gobbledygook, the remaining townsfolk are guided to the aliens’ not-so-discreet headquarters by the pilot of the shot-down spacecraft, who somehow managed to transport him/her/itself from the wreckage and flee the battlefield, leaving behind a trail of slime and comically large footprints. There isn’t even an attempt at explaining how this happens, it simply happens because the almighty Plot must be driven forward with as little downtime as possible. Anyone with half a brain can surmise, from here, where the alien track will lead the posse of survivors, who will lead this posse, the dynamics among all the posse members, and the order in which they will be picked off for the obligatory attempts at pathos.

It’s a shame that talented character actors like Clancy Brown and Sam Rockwell have to waste their formidable talents delivering expository dialogue before bland, interchangeable outdoor vistas (even though there’s an early scene, clearly improvised, where the two riff off each other hilariously; a much better movie could have been made about these two clowns trying to defeat the alien menace) and the lush anamorphic photography of Matthew Libatique starts off agreeably vivid and auburn-tinted, then gets progressively drearier and browner until we wind up in murky Heaven’s Gate territory faster than you can say “poo on the lens”.

So why do the evil E.T.’s abduct the humans? Because the Plot demands it. Because it would have been way too easy for the humans to avoid the conflict altogether by forming a wagon train and skedaddling Eastward. As we learn after a head-splittingly retarded plot contrivance, which facilitates the aforesaid Massive Exposition Dump (a scene involving a gaggle of Native American extras straight out of Central Casting, a scenery-gobbling Harrison Ford and a bowl full of peyote extract), these unnamed, personality-free extraterrestrial evildoers are little more than interstellar gold prospectors dissecting Earthlings as a kind of hobby, sort of, I guess. Like much of their motivation, save for the gold mining bullshit,  it’s left entirely to the imagination and based entirely on cliches. In other words, they’re no more well-rounded than the cast of humans. At least Kurtzman and Orci are consistent in their laziness.

Favreau, too, is becoming increasingly consistent with his soulless, generic, hyper-commercial mass-market spectacle flicks; Iron Man was the death knell for this once promising indie filmmaker, but that wasteful, pointless project was Bergman-level compared to the completely whitewashed studio slickness of Cowboys and Aliens. Whereas Iron Man was consistently hijacked by a maniacal, constantly improvising Robert Downey Jr. and stood out from the homogeneous pack of superhero garbage as a result, Cowboys is entirely subservient to a deadening, formulaic screenplay that leaves precious little breathing room for characterization and a series of monotonous CGI action sequences that are every bit as soporific and inscrutable as John Ford’s action was fiery, urgent, and immaculately choreographed. He barely moves his camera, favoring boring static shots edited to a sluggish, logy rhythm. The prosaic, unmemorable, entirely generic and un-Western-like score by Harry Gregson-Williams does no favors for the film’s energy either.

By the time we lumber to the conclusion, involving alien architecture inspired by ideas lifted from H.R. Giger’s rubbish bin, more plot conveniences courtesy of the Magical Alien Bracelet, and the laughable reveal of the film’s ultimate (and only) antagonist, what little spark the film had has long since dimmed, Favreau is just feebly trying to end the damn thing, and worst of all, it shows. There’s no passion behind the scenes, no real purpose or ultimate message or creativity in sight. After a jaw-droppingly lame action beat consisting of Craig firing his Magic Bracelet into a tunnel, gorily decimating wave after wave of humanoid goopy Space Invaders with no apparent effort or strategy involved, the evil alien doctor, who I’ll christen “Doctor Scarface”, shows up and menaces our hero for a good minute or two before a deus-ex-machina cavalry rescue reduces him to a pile of CGI goo. Then there’s yet another dramatic suicide bombing drenched in bathetic, phony holier-than-thou greater-good nonsense (though the film would have been genuinely subversive had the Preacher survived and claimed God was going to reward him in Paradise before blowing himself to smithereens), which is starting to become kind of a disturbing trend in Hollywood movies oriented toward Westernized Christian audiences.

The cynicism mentioned earlier isn’t so much contained within the barebones screenplay as it is within the formulaic, lockstep construction of the film itself. The purpose of Cowboys and Aliens isn’t to enlighten or even subvert its mashed-up genres (as what usually happens with strange genre hybrids, neither genre is given its due and the ultimate product is a formless mess); no, its only purpose is to make money by selling action figures, tie-in video games, and copies of the comic book the film was based on. There is not even the slightest attempt at sneaking in any kind of message or sneaking the tiniest glimmer of self-awareness past the draconian producers, save for the final scene.

The evil capitalist Dollarhyde and his son, who just needed to be abducted by aliens to bring him down to earth (so to speak) have inherited the town as well as the gold mine established by the extraterrestrial miners. Despite having a wrecked spacecraft in the middle of the town square, and a few dozen alien corpses in the desert, their technology hasn’t advanced one iota, and what should be a haven for the world’s scientific minds to contemplate and reverse-engineer inconceivable technology, not to mention examine the origins of organic life, is instead just another boring railroad town. Nobody mentions the aliens after the climactic suicide bombing. The status quo has returned, the bad guys have triumphed and will doubtless continue their legacy of corruption for generations to come, ruling over this town with an iron fist full of blood money. The film implies that the very existence of the aliens has been completely covered up.

As for our protagonist, who let’s not forget is an erstwhile outlaw and murderer, every woman who has dared accept his loving caresses has met a horrible death at the hands of goopy interstellar psychopaths, and his brain chemistry is irrevocably screwed up by a potent combination of alien mind-wiping, PTSD, and alcoholism. Does he stay to become Dollarhyde’s lieutenant in his new reign of terror? Regretfully not, although that would have been an ultimately cynical way to end the picture. Instead he rides off alone to his all-too-inevitable fate as a brain-damaged loner destined for a bleak future as a deranged hermit.

The ruthless tycoons win, the men of honor either die for nothing (at least disclosing the existence of the aliens would have validated the horrible deaths of all those Native Americans) or become permanently mind-fucked. Those in the audience will also be mind-fucked in the sense that more and more of their brain cells will rot away with every passing minute of the running time. As Kanbei says at the end of Seven Samurai (a film that is as masterful and trendsetting as this film is pandering and regressive), “They are the winners. Not us.”

Inception, the latest attempt to make Leonardo DiCaprio a weighty actor, fails in this impossible quest. All the ingredients of Inception are spot-on; great acting, a beguiling premise, a relentless film-noir atmosphere, and clean special effects. But having all the right notes does not necessarily make for a good film. I would hazard that Inception is a victim of its own poor editing, which in the end is far and away the most important aspect of filmmaking. Inception spends too much time dangling the premise before our noses while falling far short of a film’s most important task—creating sympathy and empathy for its characters.

DiCaprio plays Dominic the Extractor, who specializes in stealing ideas of dreams and planting ideas into people’s heads. His fellow cast members are a who’s who in A-list actors who are given frustratingly bland characters: Ken Wantabe giving us the inscrutable Asian routine once again, Joseph Gordon-Levitt still looking like a teenager, Michael Caine’s obligatory wizened old man shtick, Marion Cotillard as the wounded dream-wife always looking for a excuse to stab someone, and a surprisingly restrained (and therefore tolerable) Ellen Page playing a newly hired dream architect who should have been a major character in the story, but barely shows up in the film. Even the great Cillian Murphy (who I still refer to as “My Man Scarecrow”) is handed the most cliché of conflicts, the inability to satisfy his domineering father. He looks as bored as Jeff Bridges did in Iron Man. In essence, Inception boasts a very good looking, talented cast, but the characters inspire nothing but apathy and a sinking feeling of been there-done that.

The plot piles on top of itself like a triple-decker sandwich that’s either about to collapse or give you lockjaw. Inception has none of the Mobius strip charm of Momento or Lost Highway. There are dreams inside of dreams inside of dreams, but all these dives in the human subconscious begin to resemble each other like suburban strip malls. Look, there’s an auto-cypher of a happy family, little children laughing and running into Dominic’s arms, on the beach, naturally. And there’s the stop-motion Matrix style physics to make you feel disoriented. One of the great lines of the movie refers to the fact that you never think a dream is strange until you wake up, yet this intriguing truth is never explored. I was wondering about that until I realized that almost none of these dreams are actually strange.

The crux of Inception’s failure is, ironically enough, the blandness of its imagination. You would think that a technology such as dream manipulation would be an earth-shattering, game changing device, like the automobile or sliced bread. But alas, this most wondrous of inventions is merely at the service at some mundane corporate espionage plot device, some attempt to corner the energy market. Ho hum. And the poverty of the dreamscapes is surprising as well. The dreams we enter are anonymous cities populated by buildings of Dominic and his wife Mallorie’s nostalgia, grey streets that resemble some dreary downtown of a Midwestern city. The only scene that held any interest for me was the opium den of dreams run by chemist Yusuf (a jovially charming Dileep Rao), hinting that all this dream manipulation is becoming this generation’s crack cocaine. Now that’s a premise that could suspend my disbelief. An overbearing score by by Hans Zimmer only helps muddle the scenes, desperately trying to extract drama when there is none.

You’d figure with the unlimited potential of the human imagination, you’d have a sex orgy on a space station or a dinosaur rodeo, but I suppose married life means being shackled to a boring imagination. In short, this film is a more smartly dressed, far less obnoxious version of the migraine-inducing Strange Days. As much as I tried to suspend my disbelief, my dreams weren’t having it. Inception is not a terrible film—it’s too well acted and yes, too well directed (particularly in the case of the Taming of the Page); rather, I would describe Inception as disappointing, after the fearless 70s-style moral ambiguity and rich characterization of Nolan’s Batman films. Perhaps Inception deserves another look on my part, but I simply don’t give a hoot about Dominic and his tortured psyche. It’s nothing a halfway competent psychiatrist couldn’t sort out.

**SPOILER WARNING**

Johannesburg has been besieged by a giant hovering metaphor, which deposits a vast population of ‘aliens’ in a shantytown ruled by African gangsters. It’s up to an annoying pencil pusher with a silly accent to exterminate them for a fascist mega-corporation. District 9 wins a point for its clever use of CGI, creating the illusion of a much grander scope than its paltry budget would allow. Also, the cinematography vastly diminishes the image quality, allowing for less detail intensive modeling. The first act is a very badly done fake documentary, appearing to be something produced for South African Community Television; here, the crappy image works to the advantage of the film, provided it is viewed as a strange parody of apartheid, just as Alien Nation satirized mass Mexican immigration.

Rookie director Neill Blumkamp is too clever by half; the interviewed “alien experts” often must explain things that would be self-evident in their own universe, and there are several lame attempts at foreshadowing the terrible fate of its protagonist. Intriguing details, such as the prawn junkies who become strung out on canned cat food, are brought up and then never pay off; it’s all smoke and mirrors. The first 30 minutes are purely expository, setting up the human task force, led by a Jesse Ventura clone, who will ultimately become the one-dimensional source of villainy. The rest is bullshit that comes across like an imitation of the Media Breaks in Starship Troopers and the magnificent Robocop, both infinitely better offerings for the science fiction fan.

While the attempts at hard sci-fi are sometimes compelling, it doesn’t take very long until one realizes the trickery is there to distract us from the inherent lack of a plot. Nothing of interest happens until Wikus van der Merwe, the pencil pusher, encounters a plot device that inexplicably turns him into an alien. Somehow, this mysterious alien race is able to make fuel for their ship that turns humans into one of their own upon contact. By this logic, if a prawn were to come into contact with, say, gasoline, he would slowly but surely turn into a human. Maybe District 10 will deal with this subject. Lord knows District 9 has made a trainload of cash. Part of me’s happy for Peter Jackson and his glorious Wingnut Films, but another part’s mystified as to why everyone likes this increasingly ridiculous, onanistic CGI showcase. Even the great Walter Chaw was seduced by the skillful special effects, wrote a superlative review, and will doubtless place this halfhearted effort on his Top 10 list. To be fair, it’s been an underwhelming year at the movies, but raising District 9 to classic status is a premature action at best. Especially in light of just how bad the movie becomes after a certain point.

The third act undoes all the promise of the plotless first act, ditches the faux-doc format and turns into a braindead, formulaic buddy action flick, with the only bits of originality being Wikus’ utter heartlessness and cowardice in the face of the thinly developed Bad Guys. But he comes back to use his wicked new prawn tentacle to wreak havoc, in an unexplained, unearned shift of character. Even more insulting is the simplistic conflict, using an all-purpose evil conglomerate to represent all of humanity, which leaves the oppressed “prawns” as the only sympathetic characters by default. But, since the aliens are unable to use their own weaponry, Wikus is inexplicably left to free the prawns from the icy grasp of apartheid. And he does so during an action sequence that features  a robotic deus ex machina giving Wikus incredible powers, which cause the baddies to explode juicily while they empty machine guns into his metal carapace with no visible effect. And the damn thing is boring. As William Hurt once said, “How do you fuck that up!?”

Not like the painfully uncomplicated carnage would faze the Halo fans in the audience who are most assuredly jacked up on Mountain Dew. Cool alien gun make bad humans go BOOM! Whee!!!!

There could be so much more to this universe. How come the humans didn’t turn the floating ship into a military outpost or a tourist attraction? How come the world’s brightest minds were unable to reverse-engineer the aliens’ advanced weaponry? How come Wikus is able to maneuver an alien battle-mech, with digitized readouts all in Prawnese, after only 70 odd hours as a humalien? How come, for a movie that tries so damn hard to be against racism, the only black characters are evil drug lords, voodoo cultists, or bureaucratic puppets who end up in prison? How come, for a movie with such ambitious scope, does 75% of the action take place in a generic shantytown set? How come this Blumkamp fellow, whose only prior experience was directing video game cut scenes, gets to be called a “visionary” while much more capable directors continue to slave away unnoticed in non-genre fields?

District 9 is a shoo-in for Overhyped Film of the Year. Its novelty wears out before the second act is even through, and by the time the dickish “hero” begins his cathartic rampage, you’ll either be offended or asleep. It is just another paean to the power of the white man, dressed up with a much more elaborate disguise than usual. In the end, the sci-fi is so soft you could spread it on a Ritz cracker to wash down with some White Zinfandel.