Gun powder meets lasers

I quite like a good po-mo mash up of genres. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz for example. Gotta love a Rom-Zom-Com or a Slasher-Cop flick.

And the combination of Western & Sci-Fi has worked before - Joss Whedon's uber-brilliant-and-tragically-short-lived Firefly is a perfect case for this.

But I can't say I've ever been the hugest fan of the Western genre. Deadwood was entertaining, but I only saw a couple of episodes with Irish, and I haven't touched on it since. It seems incredibly blokey to me - battling the frontier, men against the elements, men against each other. There is also an inherent racism in Westerns. Them damn Injuns! The Native Americans and Mexicans are so far removed from mainstream, their otherness screams loud and clear in their sullen facial expressions and lack of brimmed hats. And as for women? Whores and virgins abound, except for a few hard-as-nails she-males, leathered and weathered from that same battle against the land. There also seems to be this overarching obsession with the father-son relationship... Doing daddy proud or some such macho nonsense.

The third installment of Back to the Future was always my least favourite.

I guess that formula has always just... bored me. It is the kind of films my grandfather watched. Long silences that I suppose are meant to build tension. Grubby faces and squinty eyes - oh won't someone give that man a pair of shades?

But still, with Jon Favreau at the helm, the icon of Harrison Ford, the hotness of Daniel "Mr Pout" Craig and Olivia "Turquoise Eyes" Wilde, how could I resist a little bit of excitement about Cowboys & Aliens?

What have I said about expectation management?

Like all westerns, this one starts off slow. We have stage coach robberies, and shoot outs on dusty streets. An amnesiac protagonist always helps in the exposition of information, because they can hide behind the idea that the character learns as we do. And Daniel Craig makes amnesia look pretty darn attractive. Plus there is the added mystery of that weird angular manacle...?

Hey Harrison! How cool is my Indiano Jones outfit?!

Anyway, it starts off slow. And there are a few brief moments of action, mostly when the aliens attack, and steal away the townsfolk. Lasers, and retracting chains, and exploding buildings. And flight craft that resemble beetles. But that's about it for pace. Key feature of the Western: move SLOW.

So the Wild West has been taken over by the hungry-for-gold space crabs. Closely resembling the "Prawns" from District 9, the invading forces take that idea of Vagina Dentata to a whole other level. In fact, the phallic and vaginal imagery goes a little bit bonkers in this genre mash up. And it's possible I am viewing in through my own post-feminist lenses, but it all just got a bit too much for me. The huge phallic spaceship. The guns, and pulsing hot rod weapons. The protruding digits from mucusy, triangular fleshy caverns.... This is not just me, is it?

I think the point they were trying to get at is that money ruins us all. Corruption and power and violence and green are all inextricably linked. When you get the money, you lose perspective of the important things. Like the love of your wife, the respect of your community, the motivation to be a good man (because really, it's all about the men in the Wild West!) and the decency to other living things. Aliens want gold, and they're happy to destroy everyone in their path to get it. Which is not a huge stretch from Daniel Craig's Jake (before he went all forgetty) and Harrison Ford's Dolarhyde (pron: Dollar Hide. Man who runs cattle for a living... Really?) before their purposes were united by a common alien enemy. So yeah, I get the point of the film. I see the moral, through all the glowing blue lasers exploding green blood.

Doesn't mean I have to like it though.

Cowboys & Aliens didn't really arrest me. I don't think there is quite enough sci-fi in it for the geekiest of us, but if you're into the dusty westerns, it may work for you