Is it back from the future or forward to the past? We start in the year 2149, and Earth is overcrowded, polluted and staggering towards extinction. Nobody can breathe outdoors without using a rebreather mask, and most plant and animal life has withered away. Near-derelict tower blocks rot in the sickly ginger twilight, like out-takes from Blade Runner.
The title is the film. In a new low point for high concepts, producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg only needed to see the cover of the titular, unfinished comic book to give Cowboys & Aliens the green light. Iron Man’s director Jon Favreau, JJ Abrams’ writers, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig similarly found the prospect of the sort of six-shooter/laser dust-up last seen when 1980s schoolkids tipped up their toy boxes irresistible.
It’s ironic that we TV critics were only allowed one viewing of this new sci-fi series before having to pass judgment, because even those only casually acquainted with the genre will feel they’ve seen the like of this part-Spielberg-conceived space invasion series many times before anyway. In fact, I can imagine the heads of sci-fi geeks exploding Scanners-style as their brains overheat with the effort of trying quickly to reel off all the films referenced by either concept or design in this opening episode alone.
It's tempting to characterise this new World War Two mini-series as Band of Brothers Goes to Japan, but when Steven Spielberg gets his teeth into a project, no hold remains barred and no detail unexplored. Once typecast as a purveyor of exciting but lightweight popular entertainments, Spielberg has added moral weight to his CV with films like Schindler's List and Munich, while in Saving Private Ryan he reinvented the visual vocabulary of the combat movie with horrific force.
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. And that was him somewhere under the computer-generated fur as the ultimate unreconstructed he-man Kong.