Scott Mitchell Rosenberg (Platinum Studios comic book)ĭaniel Luke Fitch. Plot Keywords: Arizona, Alien, Desert, Cowboy, Based On Comic, Alien Contact, 1870s, Small Town, Based On Comic Book, Native American, Based On Graphic Novel, 19th Century As this gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he's been. Now, the stranger they rejected is their only hope for salvation. Screaming down with breathtaking velocity and blinding lights to abduct the helpless one by one, these monsters challenge everything the residents have ever known. But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky. What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don't welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde (Ford). The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. A stranger with no memory of his past stumbles into the hard desert town of Absolution. where a lone cowboy leads an uprising against a terror from beyond our world. But all “C&A” does is illustrate how mechanical and intellectually lackluster movies have become in the age of global-minded studios.Genre: Action / Sci-Fi / Thriller / Western It has one great idea, its title, but then comes up mostly empty.Īnd that’s too bad because the western, a Hollywood staple since 1903’s “The Great Train Robbery,” has proven itself adaptable and resilient over the years, able to accommodate allegories and comment on current times.
In the end, “C&A” is a movie for a Saturday night rather than one for the ages. Wilde isn’t handed many acting challenges but looks fetching in calico and scrambles up and down cliffs nimbly. Ford, playing a bossy old cuss, has the most fun of anyone, maybe because he knows he’s no longer responsible for carrying a franchise on his shoulders. He’s not as suave here as he is when portraying James Bond, but he’s admirably stoic and, given the chance, wrings laughs where possible. (This despite five credited screenwriters, two of whom along with a third devised the screen story, which they in turn adapted from a 2006 graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.)Īs for the cast, Craig does just fine as a strong silent type. Everything simply lurches forward in episodic fashion, with cowboys going after aliens being pretty much the sum total of the movie’s plot.
Really, by now, if you’ve seen one goo-drooling alien monster, you’ve seen them all.Ĭharacters are so sketchily drawn that little is really at stake here. The sci-fi half of the film is disappointingly ho-hum and familiar, drawing on “Alien,” “Independence Day” and a score of other films from the past couple decades. “C&A” is most effective and amusing when it is plumbing the clichés of cowboy movies and goosing them, as in when Jake, galloping on horseback, attempts to outrace an alien plane. By daybreak, Jake and the Colonel are leading a posse on horseback in pursuit of the aliens. Even worse, the craft are swooping down with long metal cables, hooking folk and lifting them skyward.
Dolarhyde (Ford), a wealthy cattleman who rules the town Ella (Olivia Wilde), a mysterious young woman with a keen interest in Jake the local sheriff (Keith Carradine) an assimilated Native American (Adam Beach) and the saloon keeper (Sam Rockwell).įaster than you can load a Winchester rifle, alien spacecraft - this is 1875, remember, so actually any spacecraft would be alien - are strafing Absolution. Both he and we discover this when he heads into the nearby town of Absolution (get it?), where he comes up against Col. Turns out, he’s Jake Lonergan, and he’s a wanted man.