It’s summer movie trailer day, apparently, as the (Fun? Frivolous? Kind of vacuous?) early glimpses of Green Lantern have now been joined by this preview for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, one of Green Lantern’s biggest rivals for your 2011 credit-marks, which will soon be implanted as a barcode under your skin as part of Obama’s healthcare bill. Cowboys & Aliens also gets a jump on the new trend of “sticking a bunch of genre words together” filmmaking like Pride And Prejudice And Zombies and Cowboy Ninja Viking—although it must be said that this trailer is all about the cowboys, not so much the aliens. Specifically Daniel Craig’s craggy cowboy, who wakes up in the desert suffering from amnesia wearing a mysterious alien bracelet, and then almost immediately finds himself captured by Harrison Ford’s equally craggy sheriff. (Olivia Wilde, not so craggy, pops up as the love interest that Craig no longer remembers.) Then, just as things are at their darkest: spaceships. Suddenly Daniel Craig’s bracelet becomes less ostentatious accessory and more life-saving laser-blasting thing, and remarkably, the ostensibly silly story of cowboys fighting aliens becomes a film with actual gravitas. Damn.

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