So much stuff to watch today!

The new, full-length Cowboys and Aliens trailer has also landed today.  There’s quite a lot of new footage in this one (Sam Rockwell shows his face at last), and more of a plot. It seems aliens have been terrorizing our wide open spaces for a good long while, and it’s up to Daniel Craig to stop them.

The Western and sci-fi elements blend far better than they should, and neither seems undercooked  for the sake of the other. The Western bits are as dusty, violent, and craggy as you could wish, and the alien abduction stuff seems genuinely scary.   There is something about it — a sense of sarcasm towards the genre, or maybe just the posturing and accents of the cast — that does actually scream “We all played Red Dead Redemption before shooting!”

But that heavy metal guitar…eesh.  If there’s one cue that this could be the most divisive movie of the summer, it’s that tonal moment.    I like what I see, though.  At the very least, it’s original.

The trailer is up at Apple. Check it out, and come back to offer your insight.