Last Friday, June 14, we screened the joint Western+SciFi action film "Cowboys & Aliens" for an audience of enthusiastic movie-goers. We started the night with a short film, "The Shot", a 5-minute piece about a magical camera lens that works as a teleportation device. The short portrays a man who finds and then uses the lens to travel the world, but trouble arises when he accidentally takes a photo that has him travel out of this world!
The feature, "Cowboys & Aliens", is a genre-mashup that asks "how would a pre-1900, small western town handle an alien invasion?" The answer is: Daniel Craig, the film's leading actor. The film combines references to classic western films like "A Fistful of Dollars" alongside clear homage to sci-fi movies such as "Alien" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (up next in our summer film series). Though there is not much science to discuss in the movie, we did estimate that the height of the alien rocket is about ~3 times the size of a Saturn V at about ~10 times the width. One wonders how the aliens use gold as a power source for such a large vessel...
Join us next time on July 12th for our next Summer Film & Stargazing Event!
--Adrian Price-Whelen (graduate student)
