"Cowboys & Aliens" is awesome (spoilers)

“Cowboys & Aliens” has restored my faith in the action-adventure/sci-fi genre.

In order to do that, my faith would need to have been slipping. And it has somewhat. The comic book movies I’ve been seeing of late have been hit and miss. I generally liked the “Batman” series reboot (from the series in the ‘90s where I only really enjoyed the Michael Keaton installments). I saw “Watchmen,” the less said about that the better. I saw and enjoyed “Iron Man” but have never got around to seeing “Iron Man 2.” I saw maybe one “Transformers” film, and have never bothered with “Harry Potter.” I didn’t bother with “Spiderman,” either, and I don’t know that I will with the reboot of that series either. I haven’t seen “The Green Lantern” and can’t be bothered to see “The Green Hornet.” “Captain America” unfortunately left me somewhat cold, and “Thor” was OK, but not what I was expecting.

And that’s it. Expectations. I think the people who make trailers are able to concentrate so much awesome into the space of 60 seconds because in some movies there’s maybe exactly 60 seconds of awesome to be presented in a trailer (obviously some movies have lots more), and when you get to a 150-minute movie it’s just plain diluted.

But when I saw the trailer for “Cowboys & Aliens,” I assumed the best. It looked incredible from the word go. And some background, I enjoyed “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.” and Joss Whedon’s production of “Firefly,” so the concept of the “space western” wasn’t that foreign to me (the way it seems to be over on “Rotten Tomatoes.” Reviews in the 40s? It’s like those people never had childhoods).

True, I didn’t realize until right now that I have no idea why the campsite blew up in an explosion that tossed that drunk guy into the river. Of course it’s not really that important. The main thing is that there’s some gold in post-Civil War Arizona that a gang of alien thugs have crossed the universe to steal. As part of their mission, they fly around in these sort of multi-wing dragonfly numbers and lasso people and drag us back to their main ship and learn our weak spots.

We learn this from Olivia Wilde as Ella, who is apparently an alien whose planet the aliens attacked before they came here. She’s superstrong and she’s apparently a shape-shifter whose body can be reborn in flames.

The main character is Daniel Craig as Jake Lonergan. He’s pulled off some caper with a gang of thieves and taken the plunder back to his homestead. But as he’s discussing future plans with his wife, who physically is not dissimilar to Ella, the gold is … well, taken from him by some mining technique the aliens have perfected, and both he and his wife are abducted. Given how the aliens are able to make gold melt and float, the abductions are really steampunk. The aliens lasso their victims from their ships.

Thus abducted, Jake is experimented on by an alien medic, who he sees burn his wife to cinders. He’s ticked off, and when the medic comes after him, he surprises him by breaking his thrall, grabbing the laser cutter from the alien and turning it on his tormentor – but not before getting cut himself. He grabs the alien’s wrist weapon, escapes the alien ship and runs into the desert where he passes out.

He comes to. His memory has been wiped. He’s got the alien’s weapon on his wrist, but he doesn’t know what it is or how it got there. This is where the movie opens. Three traveling bounty hunters ride up to where Jake’s sitting in the Arizona desert. They attempt to apprehend him, but if Jake’s forgotten his name he’s not forgotten how to fight. He dispatches them forthwith, takes their guns, clothes and treasure, and rides off on one of their horses to the town of Absolution.

There he gets into a few fights, makes a few enemies and begins to piece together who he is. The town is attacked by aliens, and he’s able to bring one of their ships down with the weapon, but the alien gets away. They track him to a mysterious boat lying upside down in the desert, and they have a few more adventures, but mostly this show is Daniel Craig beating the crap out of people and aliens, piecing his psyche back together, taking a vision quest, recovering his loss, and fighting the aliens. There was more religion than I’d need in my average shoot-em-up, and there were some characters who largely escaped development, but in terms of just kicking back and enjoying a movie, I was able to just kick back and enjoy this movie.

So what’s everyone else complaining about? They say the aliens aren’t scary (despite their recessed claws and sword-like pincers) – and why is it incumbent upon aliens to be physically frightening? The fact that they abduct us and run experiments on us is scary enough for me. They’re complaining that it’s too absurd. Well, if a gang of aliens plunked down in the 1800s, what would people’s reactions be? I thought it explored it well. People didn’t stop being who they were and that was part of what was cool about this. Example, when Jake leapt on top of the alien runabout to rescue Ella, afterward his reaction was “We flew!” Which would totally be the reaction from someone who’d never done that before so yeah, a little child-like wonder is in order.

Plus, the writing team is not getting enough credit. As the names scrolled by in the opening credits I saw Roberto Orci, Damon Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman, Steven Spielberg, every name made me think “Oh, this is going to be so good,” and I was not disappointed. I thought it was an awesome movie, and that “Cowboys & Aliens” is well worth it.

"Project Runway"

I took in the season nine premiere of “Project Runway” this past week and I don’t know that any of them seem like they stand out that much. They auditioned 20 designers, chose 16 and sent four packing, which I really hadn’t gotten that clear a sense of them when they made this first cut so that ended up being a bit of a time-waster.

Especially since they also had an opening challenge where they all hopped out of bed and from a bedsheet and whatever they wore to bed that night, they made a garment, and some of them were cool and some of them were … not. The winning garment was a multi-panel oh I’m not tracking it this closely. I’ll just say the losing garment really should have, it was a good pick by the judges, and my call for top three, I think it’s way too early and I haven’t seen much of what anyone can do, but based on what instincts seemed to be visible I’m calling Danielle, Kimberly and Viktor. New episodes of “Project Runway” premiere Thursdays at 9/8c on Lifetime.

In related news, Bravo’s “Platinum Hit” finally kicked Nick to the curb but the damage has already been done. That and the guy’s getting a cover story on “Rolling Stone” (what’s the headline? “This 20-something telemarketer thinks he’s the next King of Pop”?) Whatever.

"Wonders of the Universe"

The Science channel premiered something called “The Wonders of the Universe with Brian Cox” Wednesday at 9/8c. It opened with how stars make elements. In that most newly discovered elements are created in a lab and last for nanoseconds, the premise that all elements are created in stars was inaccurate, but indeed, the vast majority of all matter we understand has been forged in stars (he didn’t go into dark matter), and the heaviest stable elements have been forged in the final moments of stars going supernova, which he illustrated with the demolition of a South American prison.

I caught the premiere in part because Cox was on the Colbert Report and highlighted the new series, which I think is probably directed at middle-schoolers. Cox talked a bit about atomic structure and the origins of the universe but his demeanor is so earnest and cloying and his treatment of the subject glosses so entirely over, well, I realize he’s only got 42 minutes and the cosmos is the cosmos, but speaking in absolutes means you have to contradict yourself if you decide to go into more detail in later episodes, so it’s better to employ more open-ended terms, and let the rest be silent.

Coming up

I saw where new episodes of “Doctor Who” are planned for late August. I saw this other program planned on the Science network for about the middle of August called “Curiosity,” where they’re taking on one of the top philosophical inquiries of all time straight out the gate – “Did God create the Universe”? I didn’t notice the followup, which for me is “How’d he do?” Apparently CNN has the Almighty polling at about 52 percent on his management of all things, so that question seems a bit up in the air. I’ll try to catch the premiere and let you know.

Lifetime is premiering a replacement drama for its Ally Walker production this Sunday called “Against the Wall.” A daughter in a family full of cops is made detective and joins Internal Affairs, and her dad and her brothers are super ticked off at her just … because. Seems to me cops who follow the rules have nothing to fear from Internal Affairs so this is maybe a family full of cops who I’d prefer to see brought down in one way or another. Either way this seems incredibly dumb, and I don’t know how you make a series out of it (the promos themselves seem really all over the place), but there it is. New episodes premiere Sundays at 10/9c on Lifetime.

What else? Well, Monday night’s “Hoarders” on A&E is going to feature someone who hoards home recordings. My reaction to this, of course, is how did they find me? Are we doing this live on the air? I mean, that’s not hoarding! It’s not! I’m archiving! Oh, it’s terribly important that I maintain a video library of practically everything I’ve ever watched and enjoyed since 1989. What? What if someday I were to need a clip of Bernadette Peters singing “Greens, Greens” from “Into the Woods” and I hadn’t kept the PBS American Playhouse broadcast from 1990? That’s right! I’d have to download it from the Cloud and that could take minutes! Precious minutes! Minutes I could spend with my family! Oh ... right. Anyway, set those DVRs and plan to record multiple copies if for no other reason than the sheer irony of it, tune in and maybe we’ll be seeing me on “Hoarders”! How exciting. That’s Monday at 9/8c on A&E.

Beyond that, if you missed last week’s Flynn and Provenza episode of “The Closer” you can catch an encore at 8/7c Monday on TNT, and it’s totally worth it. And they’re showing “Zodiac” on IFC next Saturday at 8/7c. Enjoy!