Cowboys and Aliens (film)/Headscratchers

• Why couldn't she have grabbed an extra arm-gun from the huge pile of dead aliens they had to walk around to get out of the room? Why leave Jake essentially undefended?
  • It is shown that the arm guns can't be easily removed, and they can only be opened by the wearer willing them open. So unless she finds one left lying around that is already open, she can't help.
• If not thinking causes the armband to fall off, then why didn't it fall off when Lonergan slept? In fact, he was unconscious at the very beginning of the movie.
  • Because "stop thinking" was an oversimplification. Ella was trying to transmit the "detach" signal telepathically, and Lonergan's thoughts were interfering.
    • "Transmit the detach signal"? Is that what you kids are calling it these days.
• If the aliens were attacking with aircraft, why was there randomly an alien on foot in the town during the attack?
  • Bailed from the wrecked ship. Same as later when one crashes into the water.
• The allegory. The movie is essentially, with a straight face, comparing the white settlers to hulking, brutish monstrosities. That just rubs me the wrong way.
  • We object to it because we are the aliens, whose cultural heritage is perfectly obvious to us. To natives who had never before encountered the colonialists and their advanced tech, the invaders were often being mistaken for gods, demons, or mythic beings. Perhaps the nuances of an alien culture aren't readily apparent to those who have no idea what to look for. Especially when they are in the middle of massacring you.
  • It worked a bit better in the comic book where the aliens had a more evident culture and weren't just monsters with spaceships.
• Why do so many people think the premise of cowboys fighting aliens is fundamentally ludicrous? If we accept that aliens landing on earth is a sensible plot to begin with (and judging by the thousands of movies where exactly that happens, we do), then why does setting the plot in the mid-19th Century suddenly make it crazy?
  • I think it's the idea that cowboys stand a reasonable chance against aliens and won't be utterly wiped out in the first ten minutes.
  • So after tens of thousands of years of storytelling, an outmatched hero triumphing against impossible odds is now ridiculous? Bonk that; I want to see them do a series of these movies. Just think: Colonials and Aliens, Samurai and Aliens, Spartans and Aliens...
    • There's a novel by Poul Anderson called The High Crusade. Anglo-Norman knights preparing for an excursion into the Holy Land, face a surprise Alien Invasion, kick the aliens' asses, commandeer their ship and carry the crusade beyond the stars - and that's just the first few chapters! It could make an AWESOME movie -- unfortunately, Cowboys And Aliens seems to have tanked and discredited the idea.
      • I ... don't know quite how to tell you this ...
      • That works fine, and now I'm going to watch the shit out that movie.
      • Don't bother. It's crap.
• Why is gold of any value to aliens that are clearly so advanced that they have spaceships and extremely effective weaponry? Are they cousins to the Psychlos or something?
  • Given that all the gold was being harvested towards a nest looking room in the ship where the aliens appear to be sleeping I think it was supposed to be implied that gold somehow reacts with their biology.
    • This doesn't address the fact that, with such technology, they could either fabricate it or find a gold asteroid someplace several times the size of their ship.
      • Mining asteroids for gold might indeed work, as this article attests. But fabrication? Gold is a chemical element -- the only way to synthesize it is with nuclear fission (which would nearly always result in a gold isotope that was radioactive) or nuclear fusion (which requires far more energy than it would just to look for the stuff and mine it).
  • Alternatively, the gold probably serves an aesthetic or symbolic value; like it does with humans. Also, though we have the current technology to manufacture precious substances like diamond, it is still more economical to dig them out of the ground.
• Why did the aliens need to kidnap so many human beings when they apparently knew it was so easy to kill them? They are twice our size, ten times stronger, and they have blades in their arms. It would seem pointless to keep capturing humans when having about 10 of them would allow them to conclude that humans are the most easily killed species on the planet.
  • They were using them as lab rats for other experiments?
  • In historical imperial societies, colonists have been known to reserve the kind of experiments for natives, too reprehensible for them to ever consider practising on their own people. Perhaps the aliens had an ethical problem with vivisecting their own people.
    • Historical imperial societies performed medical experiments on captive humans to learn more about their own biology. These aliens aren't human. It would be like us performing unethical experiments on cockroaches or Sequoia trees.
    • Or on lab rats and chimpanzees. These aliens still have what appear to be lungs, hearts, eyes etc, meaning that humans are similar enough to carry out a whole bunch of test on, and all without being presented any ethical dilemma.
    • They're probably looking for an easier way of killing several million/billion of us than "personally shoot and stab every single one."
    • And the bigger the sample, the more accurate the results. Handy if you're developing bioweapons or Kill All Humans RAID.
• When did Ella arrive on Earth? Was she on the same ship that Jake had been captured on or did she crashland somewhere else? Even if she did, where's her ship and why didn't she have any technology with her? Did she spend a long time learning how to speak and act human or does she have alien powers that allow her to understand it all at once like Starfire? If all that was needed is to get inside the alien tower and blow it up, why did her entire race die? Were they a non-violent species or did they not know how to do it? If throwing her in a fire didn't kill her, how were the aliens able to kill her entire race in the first place?
  • I don't think blowing up the alien tower was "all that was needed". I'm pretty sure she said that that was just the scout ship and all the other aliens were somewhere else doing other things. If the scouts decided that Earthlings were pathetic enough they'd come back with more ships and glass the place. Blowing up the scout ship sent the message to the other aliens not to mess with humans and the gold wasn't worth it. Presumably her race didn't fight the scout ship that got sent to their planet and then were crushed by the main army.
  • As for her regenerative powers, it could be that they have a limited number of times they can regenerate, or have a maximum amount of damage they can regenerate from. The giant explosion at the end did kill Ella for good (unless you're of the belief that she took on another form and left Earth at that point).
    • If she can regenerate after her body was burned, she could just as easily regenerate after an explosion. Burning is a lot more through way to destroy cells than explosions, despite being less impressive to watch.
    • To the above, nonesense. She had only been on the fire for a minute, whereas it takes more than three hours to completely burn all the combustable elements of a human corpse. Meanwhile, she was in the dead centre of an explosion strong enough to disintigrate entire alien spacecraft. Which is likely to do the more damage to a body?
  • To the "when did she arrive" question, my theory was that she either stowed away on their ship (she seemed to have a pretty good idea where everything was) or followed close behind. Likewise, I got the sense that her species had developed more along the lines of Bio Tech, which gives you lots of great social advances (immortality, for one), but not so many weapons.
• So, they've got spaceships and mining technology. Earth has a) nasty critters, b) relatively inconvenient gold fields, especially compared to c) the large, uninhabited, unclaimed, dripping-with-gold asteroid belt right next door. Why hunt for gold here?
  • Who says they didn't already mine that dry?
  • Alternately, they may just prefer to do their mining in an atmosphere whenever possible. And they just underestimated the nastiness of the locals.
  • That is also making the big assumption that the aliens have a racewide government. For all we know, these aliens are a poor mining company who couldn't afford the 'rights' to mine any profitable asteroids.
  • Everyone always assumes that just because aliens have some advanced technology, they have all possible theoretical advanced technology ever. Maybe they have the technology for interstellar travel but haven't figured out a way to reliably hang around asteroids mining them. Why doesn't that ever occur to people?
• When they were battling near the alien ship, why didn't they just take the firearms from the aliens that had them, insead of resorting to guns, spears, and dynamite?
  • Because its been made very clear that those weapons are Clingy MacGuffins. For all we know, once a weapon-bearer dies, the weapon is pretty much irretriveable, at least in the short timeframe the cowboys had. It could also explain why Ella took Jake's gun rather than nick one off the aliens Jake killed.
  • What about the rifles? There were quite clearly rifle-style guns as well as the armbands.
    • Unless the rifles are somehow tied into the armbands/their biology.
• The aliens' heart is exposed whenever it uses its second pair of arms? How in the world did their species survive long enough to learn how to build space ships?
  • By not opening it up when they're likely to get stabbed. Duh.
    • That didn't help the guy attacking Emmett at the end of the movie.
      • I think it's made pretty clear that the aliens underestimate the humans. I might have figured he would just give up and die. On top of all of that, why do we assume that the aliens are all ruthless killing machines? For all we know, that alien was a alien high school drop out who could only dig up rocks for a living.
• Why is Emmett's surname Taggart? It's clearly stated that he's John's daughter's son, and his father is still alive so it's unlikely John has adopted him officially.
  • Lots of people have their mother's maiden name. Emmett's father might not have been married to his mother.
• Why are the aliens completely naked? It's one thing to have bulletproof armor, its another thing to be completely naked, in a possibly hostile biosphere, and have natural armor. Maybe it's to facilitate the usage of the lung arms, whole other headscratchers in themselves, but why not have armor that opens up there whenever they need to use them?
  • Whose to say they ever needed clothes or armor before fighting the humans?
    • For previous wars? They already fought against at least one civilization and surely they must have had wars among themselves.
      • Their "fight" against that previous civilization was a Curb Stomp Battle. And while it's natural to assume they had wars among themselves at some point in the past, they may never have encountered a "lesser" race that was able to harm them through their natural defenses before. Same reason most lumberjack companies don't go around with a cache of full SWAT armor for every employee, even though we have the tech to do that... it's expensive and they have no expectation of needing it.
• If Ella can shapeshift, why did she keep choosing the form of a woman instead of turning into a Tyrannosaurus Rex and fighting the aliens?
  • Her shapeshifting might be limited to disguising herself, not actually changing her strength or abilities.
  • If you were on a planet full of gun toting born and bred hunters, you might think twice about becoming a big easty that would need to eat copious amounts of said hunters to stay alive. It may be easier just to blend in and pick a side.
• If Dolerhyde always wanted a son like Nat, how in the blazing hell did he raise up a brat like Percy?
  • Some kids you just can't reach under normal circumstances. Percy isn't the way he is because of how Dolerhyde tried to raise him, Percy is the way he is because that's the way he is.
  • Maybe Dolarhyde's just a shitty parent, because as already established, he's an asshole. A lot of tycoons end up raising people like Percy.
  • Dolarhyde's shown as not quite knowing what he truly wants or being able to express himself properly, which was a problem a lot of men had back then. His experiences are pretty transformative for him, which is why it's implied that the "fresh start" he's been given with Percy will work out much better this time around.
• So what now? There's plenty of bits of spacecraft and technology lying around. There are alien corpses galore lying around to prove what happened happened. Does the timeline branch off in a new direction or did the government swoop in and hush the whole thing up?
  • It probably laid around in the desert getting worn away, picked up and disassembled for pretty bits, or otherwise just destroyed by time and elements. The government of the time period isn't large and powerful enough to do any swooping, nor is any organized body large and powerful enough to rush in and start reverse engineering anything. It's probably all going to lay out in the desert until it's worthless and unrecognizable, allowing the movie to fit into the timeline without altering anything. Ask yourself where a society that hasn't quite gotten a handle on semiautomatic weapons would even START with reverse engineering a faster-than-light drive, even if there were an organized body capable of doing so that knew about its location.
• So Native Americans keep anti-amnesia medicine sitting around just in case... why? Is amnesia common in the Wild West?
  • Whose to say it was just for amnesia. For all we know, it was 19th century tylenol.
  • My father theorized it was just Peyote.