YMMV / Cowboys & Aliens

• Accidental Innuendo: An alien is killed when molten gold is dripped onto him. In other words, he gets a golden shower.
• Complete Monster (comic): Rado Dar is a vicious official of the alien empire called the Caste. Crashing on Earth, Dar promptly slaughters a group of Natives, exterminating a cavalry fort and then killing the one officer who objects. Plotting to construct a beacon to call the Caste to Earth to colonize it by killing the vast majority of humans, Dar is only too gleeful to try to butcher anyone in his path no matter what side they are on.
• He Really Can Act: Noah Ringer with his performance here proving he can emote and play the drama appropriately is in a definite contrast to how his performance as Aang turned out.
• So Okay, It's Average: General critical consensus seems to be that it was a decent movie, but considering that it had James Bond and Han Solo as cowboys fighting alien invaders, it should have been awesome.
• Tainted by the Preview: There are many reports of theater crowds, upon seeing the trailer for the first time, bursting into the laughter and dismissing the film just because of its name.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: It would take a full page to list all of the changes they made. Practically the only thing they didn't change was the main character's name.
  • The changes probably have a lot to do with the fact that the book didn't exist at the time the movie was sold to the studio, only a mockup of the cover did. They wrote it after the fact and production was already underway.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Roger Ebert and others felt that the cowboy story was more interesting without aliens being involved.
  Roger Ebert: Yet I feel a certain small sadness. I wish this had been a Western. You know, the old-fashioned kind, without spaceships. Daniel Craig, cold-eyed and lean, plays a character familiar in the genre; think of the Ringo Kid or Doc Holliday, bad guys who rise to goodness.
  Harrison Ford, as the rancher, embodies the kind of man who comes riding into town at the head of his private posse and issues orders to everyone. Sam Rockwell's Doc is the kind of small businessman who has come West while seeking his fortune among hard men. All the elements are here.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: It might look like a cool movie crossing over two things that kids love: aliens and cowboys. Even the ad services utilized for ThisVeryWiki seemed to have the same thoughts, with the ads on the movie's page being for things like SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle For Bikini Bottom Rehydrated and Sesame Street Live!. However, this isn't the case. Besides having bucketloads of violence, there's drunk characters, a few swears, tea being used as a hallucinogen and even a mention of prostitution, among other things.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: People in The Wild West are being exterminated and driven off their land by foreign, technologically superior invaders who are there for the gold. The presence of Apaches starting at the halfway mark only makes the comparisons more obvious.

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