Cowboys & Aliens (2011) on Netflix
PG-1320111h 59mActionSci-FiThriller
A wounded stranger with no memory walks into Absolution wearing a metal shackle on one wrist, and the sheriff recognizes him as the outlaw Jake Lonergan. Alien ships attack the town.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb6.0/10243,832 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes44%
Trailer
Plot summary
New Mexico Territory, 1873. A man comes to in the desert, hurt, with a metal bracelet fixed to his left wrist and nothing to tell him who he is. He makes his way to Absolution, where the preacher Meacham treats the wound and Sheriff John Taggart puts a name to him: the outlaw Jake Lonergan. Jake fights the arrest, and a traveler called Ella Swenson steps in. Taggart plans to take Jake and Percy Dolarhyde, a young drunkard, to Santa Fe for trial. Percy's father, the cattleman Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde, rides in with armed men demanding his son back and Jake handed over for gold taken from him. While the two sides face off, alien craft appear over the town, and cables drop from them to seize people from the street.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Robert Downey Jr. spent over a year in negotiations to star as gunslinger Zeke Jackson and only left the project in January 2010 to make Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows instead, with Daniel Craig hired within weeks to replace him.
- Before Paul Dano was cast as the drunken young troublemaker Percy Dolarhyde, actor Glen Powell auditioned for the same role and lost out on what became one of the film's key supporting parts.
- During a horseback riding sequence, Olivia Wilde was thrown from her horse and nearly trampled by the other riders coming up behind her; co-star Walton Goggins swung his own horse sideways to take the impact and shield her.
- To give the wounded aliens their unsettling look, texture supervisor Martin Murphy searched the internet for real photos of mold and fungus growing on trees and used them to design a yellow 'fried egg' pattern that spreads across the creatures' injuries.
- The capsized paddle-wheel steamboat stranded in the desert is presumed to represent the real Iron Mountain, a vessel that legend says was found towing two empty barges near Vicksburg before it later washed up, refloated by flood waters, in a cotton field near Tallulah, Louisiana.
- Cowboys & Aliens became the 500th movie ever to cross $100 million at the domestic box office, a milestone reached even though the film ultimately lost money for its studios.
- Despite its $163 million budget and healthy worldwide gross, the film lost Universal and DreamWorks an estimated $75-80 million and later landed on the Los Angeles Times' 2014 list of the most expensive box-office flops of all time.
