I saw Cowboys & Aliens. I promised I'd go into my main flaw with the movie here, so I'm doing that. There will be spoilers but I'll keep major ones in tags.
As a summer popcorn flick, Cowboys & Aliens is actually awesome. It makes a premise with its name alone and it totally delivers. We didn't really see much in any of the trailers so I was worried this was going to be kind of a cop-out think where the aliens chase Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford for two hours and then we see one alien at the end. This thankfully doesn't happen and we get to see plenty of them. The human characters (well, most of them) are all well-developed and all the major characters have their own awesome moments (although there's a subplot between the preacher
who dies about a half hour or so in
and the doctor about the doc basically not believing in religion that never really gets resolved*). Everyone acts their part and the movie 'looks' great. The alien designs even manage to be mostly original in a world where alien designs are really easy to come by--they kind of resemble a cross between the Krogan and Turians from Mass Effect, in that they're very bulky and topheavy but also still very fast. They actually kind of look like the Cloverfield monster, too. (And unlike that thing, we actually get a lot of really good looks at these.)
I have two main problems. First off, we're never really given any significant motivation for why the aliens are on Earth. There's a woman
who, it turns out, is part of another alien species who can apparently shapeshift
who acts as an exposition machine who tells the good guys that the aliens are after gold. When they ask why the fuck aliens want gold, she just says "It's as rare to them as it is to you." That doesn't answer anything! Why do they need it? Humans use it as currency. Is that what they're doing? When they get inside the aliens' hideout, we see they're actually melting down all the gold they're stealing, but we're never given an explanation
why they need it, just that it's apparently rare to them also. Is it an energy source? Does it power their spaceships? Do they eat it? Is it ammo for them? Why do they need it?
Which, naturally, leads me into my next point: The entire ending is played entirely straight, and nothing is really learned from the end of it. The cowboys don't see the way the aliens are invading their land as an allegory for how they're overtaking the Native American's land. (Which, by the way, a bunch of them show up to help the cowboys 2/3s of the way through the movie. There's a lot of well-done tension there but it never quite gets resolved to my liking.) We don't get any kind of real exposition for what they're doing here, or anything about them, besides from the mouth of the Exposition Girl.
Also, we never see what she actually looks like. We only really know she's an alien because she dies, they burn her body, and she comes back to life from the flames, and then tells us "Yeah, I'm a different alien."
Exposition Girl takes Daniel Craig's alien bracelet cannon (which is awesome in every scene it's in) and can apparently blow up the aliens' spaceship with it
sacrificing herself in the process
. Why can it do this? We're never told. She simply knows how to do it. Can all of the bracelets do this, or is it just the one Daniel Craig ended up with? Dunno.
Here's what I would have liked to see instead: The woman takes Daniel Craig's bracelet cannon thing...
and then reveals that she's one of the aliens they've been fighting the whole time. She's their leader. She took on a human form to seduce Daniel Craig and convince him to give her the bracelet cannon because, with it, he's the only one who can actually do any real harm to the aliens.
Then I guess Daniel Craig could shoot her and blow up the spaceship. That'd be a little bit better! At least then we would have 'something' interesting in the end besides just...cowboys killin' aliens. I mean, it looks cool but we learn nothing.
Another plot twist that would have worked: Daniel Craig gets into the spaceship and 'meets their leader,' who can speak English. Or maybe even speaks telepathically, that'd be neat! And Daniel Craig is all "Why the fuck are you here?" and he could have been all "We're just trying to survive. These other aliens destroyed our planet and we're just looking for a way to survive." "What, by coming into a place you don't belong and killing all the people who live there?" "Isn't that what you guys are doing to the Indians?" "Oh fuck, you're right." That would simultaneously make everything the aliens (and the cowboys) have done end up in a much different light; and also the aliens that wiped out their planet could be
the race that Exposition Girl is part of.
*And that's another thing! At the end, everybody's just like "Welp, that spaceship is blown up, everything's great!" There's no discussion about what the fuck everyone just saw. There's nobody reasoning that maybe there really isn't a God anymore, or wondering if those things are out in space, what the hell else is out there? Which would be a decent sequel hook.
So yeah. Overall my problems with it approach something more like "I wish the plot ended more interestling." I just feel like, with a movie that's already taking a perfectly straight trope (cowboy movie) and throwing aliens into it, you can stand to take a chance on an ending that isn't basically Humanity Rules And Aliens Suck. It's a missed opportunity. I still recommend the movie, though!
Gold is one of the least reactive solid chemical elements, and it's a good electrical conductor, making it very useful for all sorts of technological applications. NASA uses gold for a number of things in spacecraft, such as in the aforementioned electronics, but also a gold-coated polyester film on the space craft to help stabilize the temperature as well as a gold lubricant given organic lubricants would break down from exposure to radiation in the vacuum of space. Being a highly technologically advance race capable of interstellar space travel, it would make sense if they also used gold for a number of technological applications.