'Cowboys & Aliens' - Modern Western keeps it in the family

BY GENE TRIPLETT

No telling what John Wayne might’ve thought of his grandson acting in some loco Western called “Cowboys & Aliens.”

“Young ‘un,” the Duke might have bellowed, “you been out in the sun too long without yer Stetson?”

But Brendan Wayne, 39, isn’t so sure his granddaddy would disapprove.

“The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think — relative to today — he’d love it,” the third-generation actor said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles. “It’s a great way to tell a classic story that otherwise can’t be told because you’d offend cultures that don’t deserve to be offended. It was simpler back then. We didn’t understand the breadth of cowboys and Indians.”

Brendan Wayne plays a deputy in a small, 1875 New Mexico town that’s ambushed by varmints from another planet in director Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys & Aliens.”

“And then he drifts into my town where I’m a deputy with Keith Carradine playing the sheriff,” Wayne said. “And we don’t know what’s going on, but we know that our town’s kind of under attack and that we’re losing people, and we think it’s the Indians coming to take ‘em. And the juxtaposition is that the Indians feel the same way. They think we’re taking their people.”

Meanwhile, Craig’s character discovers that the townspeople don’t cotton to strangers, and everyone takes their orders from the iron-fisted Col. Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). It’s a town that’s already used to living in fear, but when incredible flying machines start streaking down from the sky to snatch people away, things get downright scary.

And as the stranger begins to remember who he is and what he’s just been through, Dolarhyde and his men, a gang of outlaws and an encampment of Chiricahua Apache warriors realize the mysterious drifter’s leadership may be their only chance of fighting off the airborne invaders.