Cowboys & Aliens 2011

Cowboys & Aliens is a 2011 American science fiction Western film directed by Jon Favreau and starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde. The film is based on the 2006 graphic novel of the same name created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. The main plot revolves around an amnesiac outlaw (Craig), a wealthy cattleman (Ford), and a mysterious traveler (Wilde) who must ally to save a group of townspeople abducted by aliens. The screenplay was written by Damon Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby, based on a story by the latter two along with Steve Oedekerk. The film was produced by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Kurtzman, Lindelof, Orci, and Rosenberg, with Steven Spielberg serving as executive producer.
The project began development in 1997, when Universal Pictures and DreamWorks bought film rights to a concept pitched by Rosenberg, former president at Malibu Comics, which he described as a graphic novel in development. After the graphic novel was published in 2006, development on the film was begun again, and Favreau signed on as director in September 2009. On a budget of $163 million, filming for Cowboys & Aliens began in June 2010, in New Mexico and California. Despite studio pressure to release the film in 3-D, Favreau chose to film traditionally and in anamorphic format (widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film) to further a classic movie feel. Measures were taken to maintain a serious Western element despite the film's "inherently comic" title and premise. The film's aliens were designed to be "cool and captivating, with some details, such as a fungus that grows on their wounds, created to depict the creatures as frontiersmen facing adversity in an unfamiliar place.
Cowboys & Aliens premiered at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con and was released theatrically in the United States and Canada on July 29, 2011. The film, though having grossed its budget back, is considered to be a financial disappointment, taking $174.8 million in box office receipts on a $163 million budget. Cowboys & Aliens received mixed reviews, with critics generally praising its acting but critical of its blend of the Western and science fiction genres.
After its release, a lawsuit was filed against those involved in the development of the film by Steven John Busti, who claimed that the film infringed the copyright of his own similarly themed work written in 1994.

Plot

In 1873, Arizona Territory, an unnamed loner (Daniel Craig) awakens in the desert injured, with no memory, and with a strange metal band shackled to his wrist. After beating three drifters who try to rob him, he takes their clothes, weapons, and a horse and rides off. He wanders into the small town of Absolution, where the local preacher, Meacham (Clancy Brown), treats his wound. After the stranger subdues Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), a volatile drunk who has been terrorizing the town, Sheriff Taggart (Keith Carradine) recognizes the stranger as Jake Lonergan, a wanted outlaw, and attempts to arrest him. Jake nearly escapes, but a mysterious woman named Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde) incapacitates him.

Percy's father, Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), a wealthy and influential cattleman, arrives with his men and demands that Percy be released to him. He also wants Jake, who stole Dolarhyde's gold. During the standoff, alien aircraft begin attacking the town, and Percy, the sheriff, and many townsfolk are abducted. Jake shoots down one ship with a device concealed in his wrist band, ending the attack.

Dolarhyde, Ella, and some townsfolk form a posse to track an alien that ejected from the downed ship. Jake, meanwhile, travels to an abandoned cabin, and in a flashback, recalls returning there with the gold just before he and a woman, Alice (Abigail Spencer), were abducted by the aliens. Jake returns to join the posse. During the night, the alien they were tracking appears and kills Meacham, who sacrifices himself to save Emmett (Noah Ringer), Taggart's grandson.

By the next morning, most of the posse has deserted, and the others are attacked by Jake's former gang. Jake, who stole the gang's loot after their last heist, attempts to retake control, but fails. As he and the others flee, the aliens begin attacking again and Ella is captured. Jake jumps aboard the ship and attacks the alien pilot, causing the ship to crash, but Ella is fatally wounded.

Chiricahua Apaches capture the posse, blaming them for the alien attacks. As Ella's body is dumped on a fire, she is fully resurrected. Ella reveals herself to be an alien who traveled to Earth to help resist the invaders after they destroyed her homeworld. The aliens, who have been abducting humans to perform experiments on them, are also mining gold to power their machines. They are not invulnerable, however: Jake's gauntlet weapon can kill them, as well as stabbing and shooting them, though the creatures are far stronger and more durable than humans and have superior weapons. Ella claims Jake holds the secret to the aliens' whereabouts and says they must stop them before they exterminate all life on the planet. After taking medicine offered by the Apaches, Jake recalls that Alice died in an alien experiment, but he escaped, inadvertently stealing the alien weapon. He can also remember the aliens' hidden location.

Armed with this knowledge, the group, now led by Dolarhyde, prepares to attack the aliens' grounded mothership. Jake returns to his old gang and persuades them to join the fight. In a sneak attack, the humans breach the spaceship, forcing the aliens into a ground battle. Jake and Ella board the ship and free the captives, but Jake is captured. Dolarhyde rescues him and both men escape the ship after killing the alien leader. As the remaining aliens are taking off in their damaged craft, Ella sacrifices herself, destroying the ship using Jake's gauntlet.

Jake's memory partially returns, and some abducted townsfolk begin to remember their past. Still a wanted man, Jake decides to leave; the sheriff and Dolarhyde say they will claim that he was killed in the invasion. The citizens intend to rebuild the town with the expectation that the newly discovered gold mine will soon bring many new settlers. Jake kindly rejects Dolarhyde's offer to help rebuild the town, and rides away.

The project began development in 1997, when Universal Pictures and DreamWorks bought film rights to a concept pitched by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, former president at Malibu Comics, which he described as a graphic novel in development. They hired Steve Oedekerk to write and direct the film, which Oedekerk planned to do after completing Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. Rosenberg, who formed Platinum Studios to pursue adapting Cowboys & Aliens and other Malibu Comics properties into film and television, joined as a producer. By 1998, Oedekerk left the project to pursue a remake of the 1964 film The Incredible Mr. Limpet with Jim Carrey. By 2004, the film rights were acquired by Columbia Pictures, who did not move the project beyond development.

In 2006, Rosenberg published Cowboys & Aliens as a graphic novel. In the following year, Universal and DreamWorks partnered again to adapt Cowboys & Aliens into a film.  In June 2008, Robert Downey, Jr. entered negotiations to star in the film as Zeke Jackson, a former Union Army gunslinger. While Downey, Jr. was making Iron Man 2, he told director Jon Favreau about Cowboys & Aliens. Favreau investigated the project, and in September 2009, he joined as director. Downey, Jr. left the project in January 2010, to star in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and later in the month, Daniel Craig was hired to replace him. Favreau said Craig's portrayal of James Bond "brings a certain virtuosity".He also described Craig, "On the one hand, he's like this Jason Bourne type, a leading man who's also a lethal character, but on the other hand, he's also got a lot of humanity and vulnerability to him.

In April 2010, Harrison Ford was cast alongside Craig. Favreau had cast Craig and Ford in the film because they were actors who suited the action-adventure roles so the characters would be less seen as comedic. The director compared Ford, in particular, with John Wayne in having "a sense of history" with the actor and the role. Before Cowboys & Aliens, Ford had previously acted in the Western films A Time for Killing in 1967, Journey To Shiloh in 1969 and The Frisco Kid in 1979. While Ford is well-known for playing Indiana Jones, the filmmakers wanted to avoid giving him a cowboy hat that would remind audiences too much of Jones. Writer Alex Kurtzman said, "We needed to make sure that—no pun intended—we tipped a hat to iconography of Harrison Ford and also presented the audience with a very different version.
Olivia Wilde was cast in one of the lead roles, and Favreau called Wilde's character the key to the film. Sam Rockwell was cast in a supporting role as Doc. The character was described as a large Mexican in the original script, but when Favreau and the writers learned of Rockwell's interest in the film, they reconceived and expanded the role. Favreau himself is known for appearing in his films, but for Cowboys & Aliens, he chose not to make a cameo appearance because he thought it would affect the tone of the film.
When asked about how the film was developing, Rosenberg stated, "It's incredible. Sometimes it's like seeing exactly what was going through my head when I first had that spark in my head as a kid. Jon Favreau's bringing his own talent and vision with the adaptation, but at the same time it remains true to what I was really trying to get at in the original story.
Steven Spielberg, one of the film's executive producers, visited the director and the writers during pre-production to look over the script and the artwork. He provided Favreau with a collection of classic Western films. Spielberg also invited the director and the writers to a private screening of several Western films and provided live commentary on how to make one properly. The films included Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and Destry Rides Again. Spielberg made several other suggestions: a main enemy alien, Jake's final use of the gauntlet being to decapitate an alien, and that Jake and Ella's first kiss should occur in the climax of the film.

Writing

In the film's period as a developing project under several studios, different versions of the screenplay were drafted by numerous screenwriters, beginning with Steve Oedekerk. Other screenwriters involved included David Hayter, Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, Jeffrey Boam, Thompson Evans, and Chris Hauty. When Universal and DreamWorks re-partnered in 2007, they hired Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus. In 2009, Ostby and Fergus were replaced by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Damon Lindelof. Kurtzman and Orci analyzed American Western films including The Searchers. Orci said, "The first draft was very kind of jokey and broad and then it went very serious. You kind of swing back and forth between the two extremes and the tone until you find the exact right point where a Western and a sci-fi movie can really shake hands without it seeming unnatural. Imagine you're watching Unforgiven and then Aliens land," Orci explained.

Orci also said, "The comic has the themes of enemies uniting to fight a common enemy and has the setting of that specific time period, so we kept the inspiration from all of that. In terms of the specifics of the story and who these characters are, we wanted the audience to be surprised and to not feel like they've already seen everything if they were fans of the comic. So, while the themes and the setting and many of the elements are a great inspiration, the story is completely adapted and translated for live action. The aliens were loosely based on the Anunnaki gods of Zecharia Sitchin's interpretation of the Babylonian religion, who have a distinct interest in gold.

Filming

Cowboys & Aliens was not originally planned to be shown in 3-D. When approached with the idea by DreamWorks, Favreau was not interested, stating that Westerns should be shot only on film (as opposed to being shot digitally, which is required for modern 3D technology), and didn't want it to be converted after filming. "That would be like filming in black and white and colorizing it," he reasoned. Director of photography Matthew Libatique shot Cowboys & Aliens in the anamorphic format on 35 mm film to further a classic movie feel
On a budget of $163 million, principal photography for Cowboys & Aliens began at Albuquerque Studios in New Mexico on June 30, 2010. One of the filming locations was Plaza Blanca, "The White Place", where Western films like The Missing, 3:10 to Yuma, City Slickers, Young Guns, and The Legend of the Lone Ranger had been filmed. Sound stage work took place in Los Angeles, with additional location shooting at Randsburg, California. Filming finished on September 30.
A scene in which Craig's character rides a horse alongside a ravine and jumps down it onto a spacecraft emulated many scenes in American Western films where cowboys rode along a moving train and jumped on it. Favreau said the scene referenced the one in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones chases a truck and noted that a similar scene existed in the 1939 film Stagecoach, saying "We're constantly referencing back to our roots." Cowboys & Aliens also make multiple references to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, such as the introduction to the aliens through the bright lights on their aircraft and an upturned paddle steamer in the middle of the desert.   The film also tease monster movies, and the scenes in the paddle steamer were a deliberate homage to Alien.

Design and effects

Scott Chambliss was hired as the production designer based on his work on Star Trek, produced by Orci and Kurtzman. The visual effects were created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), represented by Roger Guyett and Eddie Pasquarello as visual effects supervisors. Under the supervision of Shane Mahan, Legacy Effects created practical puppet aliens and full scale alien speeders. New Deal Studios constructed a miniature of the paddle steamer that is seen upturned in the film. Kerner Optical built a miniature of the alien ship and bluescreen stand-ins. The film also featured visual effects by Fuel VFX, The Embassy, Ghost, and Shade VFX, with previsualization from Halon Entertainment.
Favreau noted that Cowboys & Aliens focuses on a specific aspect of the alien genre which primarily revolves around the films of the 1980s: And although we have quite a bit of CG – I like the way they told stories before – before you could show everything with CG. And it was a real unveiling of the creature, little by little, and using lighting and camera work and music to make it a very subjective experience. And so we tried to preserve that here. In designing the film's aliens, ILM was careful to make the creatures "cool and captivating. Guyett stated that they adopted a similar approach to that of District 9:


An alien with wounds covered in a yellow fungus. Details such as this were created to depict the creatures as frontiersmen facing adversity in an unfamiliar place.
The trick was to make [the aliens] interesting through their behavior and what happens to them, and that was something that District 9 did very well. You were drawn into their world a bit and their idiosyncrasies had an immediate impact: they ate cat food. But those details overwhelm certain design aspects, so I was striving to find some behavior that fit in well with the Western genre, where you have people in very arduous conditions fighting the elements. And I thought that the irony of all this was that the aliens turn up and it could be more exaggerated for them. They're frontiersmen in a way: traveling to another place and having to deal with all the adversities of the climate. And in our case, we played up the fact that they weren't comfortable in our world. There are flies all around them; they don't like the light; and when they were wounded and exposed, a strange fungus grows around them.
The use of anamorphic lenses gave ILM no extra room to re-frame shots; it was a challenge to show both nine-foot-tall aliens and smaller humans in the same space. Instead, Guyett said, they shot more areas in case portions of the shots were lost. In filming the gun battle between the cowboys and aliens, in which the aliens move at twice the speed of the humans, actors were required to ride through the scene on horseback and shoot at men in gray suits and three-foot-tall hats; they aimed at faces drawn by Jon Favreau on the top of the hats. A big challenge for ILM's texture artists was to show the aliens in both a dark cave environment and harsh sunlight. The creatures were rendered in high resolution for close-ups; dirt and wounds were added to the aliens to emphasize the injuries they sustained in battle. After Favreau requested that the aliens experience a very unpleasant biological reaction to being wounded on Earth, the texture team created a yellow fungus-like look on the scars of the aliens. To design the fungus, texture supervisor Martin Murphy searched the Internet for real pictures of mold and growth on trees and eventually designed a "fried egg pattern. The heads of the aliens were based on those of sea turtles, after Favreau encountered sea turtles during a trip to Hawaii.
At the suggestion of Steven Spielberg, an "über-alien" was also designed. It was unclear if the red scar Jake gives the über-alien after escaping vivisection would be enough of an identifier to distinguish it from other aliens, so the creature was redesigned with translucent, pale skin due to the lack of time spent outside. Favreau described the über-alien as more fleshy and anthropomorphic than the other aliens and Murphy commented, "There are some parts of him like his arm that you can see into. It's almost like glass or ice or gelatiny surface that blends into a dryer area. The sic there's pieces of him that are more like a soft-shell crab or shiny and wet.
In addition to the aliens, other visual effects were required for the speeders, the alien spaceship, its interior, environment re-creations, and the head up display for Jake's arm gauntlet. For the invasion of the town of Absolution, both practical laser lighting and fire effects were utilized, along with practical ships and effects enhancements. ILM artists had to enhance the initial look of the alien "bolos", the cables used to abduct people, with renderings such as extra lights, after viewers thought the studio had failed to "paint out" the cables in the film’s first trailer. For a scene in which Jake and Ella ride on a speeder, the actors were filming on a practical mock-up against bluescreen; they were digitally replaced in wider shots.

Marketing

Cowboys & Aliens, which crosses genres with the American Western element of cowboys and the science-fiction element of extraterrestrials, has an "inherently comic" title and premise. At the San Diego Comic-Con International in July 2010, director Jon Favreau hosted a presentation and was accompanied by the film's primary cast members, including Harrison Ford in his first Comic-Con appearance. In the presentation, Favreau explained to audiences that he intended the film as a serious mix of the Western styles of Sergio Leone and John Ford and "really scary" science fiction like Alien and Predator. The first trailer for the film appeared in the following November, and The New York Times reported that film audiences found the premise comedic. Eddie Egan, the president of marketing at Universal Pictures, acknowledged the misconception and said, "The trailer is the first very public step in reconciling the tone of the movie with the more immediate effect of the title on its own. The studio anticipated a marketing campaign that would demonstrate that the film is "a tough-minded adventure" like Unforgiven by Clint Eastwood.

During Super Bowl XLV on February 6, 2011, the studio aired a TV spot for Cowboys & Aliens. Hours before the American football game, Favreau used Twitter to link followers to the spot online. Entertainment Weekly reported, "It . . . roused the geek-hive fan base and stirred new speculation about his hybrid of classic Westerns and extraterrestrial-invasion thrillers. After the spot aired, Favreau said the first trailer was intended as an introduction to pique people's curiosity and that the Super Bowl TV spot was "showing more of the sense of adventure as things unfolds.

In April 2011, Favreau and Roberto Orci appeared at WonderCon in San Francisco, where they presented nine minutes of film footage and answered questions about the film. Favreau explained that marketing would show "only a brief glimpse of the aliens of the title" before the film is released. He explained the withholding of certain elements, "I think there are enough visionary people involved with this film that there is an understanding that there is a personality that the marketing campaign can take on as well as the film itself . . . I want to make sure that if the audience goes to see [the film], there is going to be a lot of surprises in it that they haven't seen in the marketing materials. Box office

On the opening day of Cowboys & Aliens, estimates showed that its opening day gross was $13.0 million and it came in second place to The Smurfs's opening day gross of $13.3 million. This was considered a surprise since Cowboys & Aliens was expected to be the clear winner for the weekend. Estimates then showed Cowboys & Aliens and The Smurfs tied at the #1 spot for the weekend with $36.2 million each. However, when the actual results for the weekend were announced Cowboys & Aliens won the weekend with $36.4 million just beating out The Smurfs, which grossed $35.6 million.  The film grossed $100,240,551 in the U.S. and Canada (making it the 500th $100 million domestic movie) as well as $74,581,774 internationally, bringing its worldwide total to $174,822,325. The film is considered to be a financial disappointment, narrowly grossing its budget back.