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| Harrison Ford as Woodrow Dolarhyde and Daniel Craig as Jake Lonergan |
A very fine movie, once you get over the premise. Of course, the premise isn't any weirder than any other aliens-from-outer-space visit/attack earth. I mean, if they could do it any time in the last 50 years, why couldn't they do it 150 years ago?
Harrison Ford plays a villain, which is kind of entertaining. Daniel Craig is the anti-hero. They are both tough guys. One scene in particular plays this up. Harrison whacks Daniel in the head with the butt of his rifle, a blow that would send any normal man, or character, to the ground, but not Daniel. He turns around and punches Harrison in the jaw, likewise a knock-a-man-to-the-ground kind of blow. All Harrison does is flinch. Then they glare at each other. Having established that they are both tougher than nails, they go on about their business.
Olivia Wilde plays the tough girl with a gun, except she's really an alien too, but she is one of the good aliens, not one of the bad ones. With the way she looks, she could have been one of the bad aliens and it would have still been okay.
Given that Harrison had been through the Civil War, you'd think he could have come up with a better method of fighting the bad aliens than riding around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. The aliens are tough, but they will still succumb to a well placed rifle bullet. The sound from the cowboy's six-guns has been dialed down so they sound like pop guns compared to the super-high-tech alien blaster thing-a-ma-bob, which is a very effective weapon, but there only seems to be one, and Daniel has got it. Not that the aliens have any need of it to dispatch these puny humans in any number of gory ways.
Paul Dano gives an impressive performance as Harrison's spoiled son, Percy. That's one of the nice things about playing a villain, you can invent all kinds of ways to be horrible, whereas if you play the hero your role is pretty much right on the straight and narrow. Percy is just the most amazingly worthless character I have seen in a while.
Update January 2021 replaced missing image, removed dead link.
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