Bar shots similar to Kosner's Wyatt Earp

These back lighted shots through the swinging doors are very similar to the opening shots of the Kosner western.

Cowboys & Aliens shots dublicate John Wayne films

These are shots that are largely taken straight from the concluding scnes of The Sons of Katie Elder.

We don't just get allusion in plot, but also in images.

Lost women in Cowboys and Aliens

With the exception of the good alien, who came to assist humanity in ridding itself of the bad aliens, women don’t play a large role in Cowboys & Aliens except as victims of abduction, or by their absence.
The most obvious of these is Jake, who fell in love with the prostitute, Alice, and lost her when he brought home the blood money, the bad aliens abducting her, the gold and Jake himself, for evil, inhuman experiments that eventually kills her and leaves Jake wounded and at lost for a memory of who he is and where he’s been.
Sadly for Jake, he loses the female alien, too, forcing him to wander the world at the end alone.
The minister seems without a significant other and so gets stuck with Jake and the doctor to say words of comfort over his grave.
Clearly, there is no woman in the military man’s – Dollarhide – life, otherwise, she might have pinned back the ears of his gun toting spoiled brat of a son, he is forced to leave in the care of male hired hands, who do a piss poor job of keeping him under control and out of trouble.
The sheriff takes care of his grandson because his daughter died and was buried near the town, while the father is off somewhere promising to return at some point.
Even the doctor, who starts out with a good wife, loses her along the way and has to go and retrieve her.
The cowboy world was largely a male dominated world, but you would think that with all of those people being lassoed by alien craft and dragged away, some women would want to join the posse to get one back.
But there is clearly something being said here, about men and their children, about fatherhood and husbandhood, which having a woman around would somehow negate.
Even the outlaws seem more than a little perturbed by the fact that Jake gave them up in order to take up with a whore – a separate issue from the fact that he made off with the gold to do it.
This film is about becoming a man and what it takes, as clearly defined by Dollarhide’s relationship to the sheriff’s grandson.
Mothers seem in short supply, even the Indian boy Dollarhide more or less adopted, but is somewhat shamed of.
Dollarhide himself went with his father before the war to become a man.
What it takes depends on the person. Jake is supposedly a man, and yet has a lot to learn about what it means to find and keep love.
The doctor has similar issues, somewhat whinny when it comes to his dream, and not very appreciative of his wife’s sacrifices.
Dollarhide – who has his share of wisdom – fails to appreciate what he has before him, not in cattle or power, but in human wealth. While he is clearly blind to the virtues of his adopted Indian son, he is even more out of touch with his real son. Dollarhide’s relationship to the sheriff’s grandson provides him with a strong tie to his own passed, and what it took for him to become a man at that age. Somewhere in this mix, in the telling of stories to the younger boy and in his losing his Indian son and saving of his real son, Dollarhide rediscovers a fundamental truth about his own life.

Cowboys and Aliens meets The Searchers

Some critics call Cowboys & Aliens a mash up between SF and Western, when in reality, it is mash up between a Clint Eastwood movie, and those made by John Wayne.
With Jake depicted as a Clint Eastwood character and the military man dawn out of John Wayne movies such as The Searchers and Red River.
You can easily imagine the pre-filming meetings with the actors advising them on how to portray these.
While the opening scene of Jake lying on the ground appears to have been lifted from Wild Wild West after Jim West falls from the villain’s mechanical spider, I’m pretty sure both images were lifted from a Clint Eastwood Italian western, just as some of the other scenes of Jake were.
The Harrison Ford character transitions from Red River into The Searchers with several other John Wayne films tossed in, perhaps even The Horse Soldiers.
In the Searchers, John Wayne travels with a son who is partially Indian, a fact which he cannot forget as he pursues the woman he loves. Harrison Ford’s character hates Indians, including the Indian boy that most loves him like a father.
In Red River, we get a John Wayne that is a ruthless cattle baron and his adopted son. His wife was killed by Indians before the story starts. In Cowboys & Aliens, we have Ford as a ruthless cattle baron with a spoiled son, who has left much of the raising of his son to hired hands. As in the Red River, Ford’s men abandoned him half way through his pursuit of town’s people abducted by the aliens.
This pursuit seems to echo The Searchers in that the Ford character is a veteran of the Civil War that has a personal gripe with Indians – and pushes away the boy who is more like his son than his real son because he is an Indian.
In some ways, the aliens are really just another Indian tribe, the stereotype of the bad Indian vs. the good Indians the searchers in this film eventually find.
As in The Searchers, the aliens have abducted loved ones – including the military man’s real son – and the group must get them back.

The upside down ship in Cowboys and Aliens

Anybody who knows anything about Steven Spielberg has to have recognized the symbolism of the upside down paddle wheeler 500 miles from any river big enough to handle it.
In many films that a produced or director by Steven Spielberg, we get these kind of images, alluding often to other films or pieces of fiction to build a kind of subtext that is not overly obvious.
This is different from some of the short cuts Spielberg and his cronies sometimes take – such as the recent car chase in Transformers and The Island, or many of the other less obvious tricks Spielberg sometimes plays such as the blow pipe trick that appears in both Young Sherlock Holmes and later in Crystal Skull, or the temple scene Spielberg lifted wholesale to use again in Temple of Doom.
At their best, films associated with Spielberg are layered, and these have symbolic keys that allow us to unlock deeper layers of meaning in each film.
The upside down paddle boat appears to be one of these, a reference back to one of Spielberg’s classic film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where we encounter a finishing trawler grounded in the middle of the Gobi Desert, a thousand miles from the nearest sea.
Close Encounters is – among other things -- a kind of retelling of the Biblical account of Moses and his call to the mountain to collect the Ten Commandments. And with Cowboys and Aliens literally drenched in religious dogma, you have to wonder if this symbol of Spielberg’s past serves as a key to unlock some religious subtext here in this film.
In Close Encounters, the stranded ship is one of a series of events that indicate alien presence, foreshadowing of later more direct contact, including abductions and eventually, the musical dialogue between human and alien.
It is here that the wounded evil alien takes refuge against the rain and pursuit, and it is here that it lays in wait, eventually making its move against the sheriff’s grandson, and it is here that the minister is slain.
The minister has already given his words of wisdom to each of the pilgrims, who are making their way through the Bad Lands towards a fate none of them yet know, each seeking “absolution.”
But like Moses after delivering the tablets and law of this new faith, the minister cannot go on to the promise land, instead remaining behind, with a few words spoken over his grave before the others continue on.

Unforgiven’s influence on Cowboys & Aliens

No one can possibly make a modern western without paying tribute to what many consider a masterpiece of western fiction: The Unforgiven.
Cowboys & Aliens is no exception.
In some ways, The Unforgiven ripples through nearly every scene in this film, filling it with allusions and echoes of the earlier film.
In The Unforgiven, we have a notorious gunman, who is trying to forget his past, trying to live up to his wife’s expectations of a decent man.
In Cowboys, we have an outlaw who has been granted a gift of forgetfulness, a chance to find absolution by fighting on the right side – largely because he can’t remember who he was, but who has already taken the first step towards salvation when he fell in love with a prostitute named Alice.
In The Unforgiven, the outlaw, whose wife has died, gets an offer to avenge the wrong done to a prostitute named Alice, by taking up the bounty to kill them.
We get repeated images and situations in Cowboys that we saw in the Unforgiven, including a spectacular shoot out in the beginning, the hero being beaten up by bad guys, even a similar scene of the hero being stitched up.

We even see him looking at a photograph of his dead wife in the Unforgiven, the way the hero in Cowboys does.
There are a number of repeated images, comic elements such as attempts to learn or relearn how to shoot, and other sequences that are clearly drawn from the earlier film as a tribute.
Cowboy’s hero even wears the same hat at the hero in The Unforgiven, and we get a similar scene of law men coming into the bar in both films.
But the essence of the character is the same: both outlaws have to live with their notorious pasts and must somehow make things right so that they can move on into the future.
While the Cowboys hero steals blood money from fellow crooks, the Unforgiven hero earns his blood money.
Both heroes struggle with memory, although in the Unforgiven, the hero can’t remember because he was mostly drunk when he committed his felonies.
There is even a similar theme about death and afterlife in both films, as The Unforgiven hero mistakes Alice the prostitute for an angel. In Cowboys, we get the alien woman who pretty much is an angel. In both films, the heroes are well aware of good and evil, heaven and hell, as the Cowboy hero tells the villain to collect his gold in hell, while the villain in the Unforgiven tells the hero, he’ll see him in hell. Since in both films, it is clear that while they might be able to make amends, they are doomed to eternal punishment.

Shane and Cowboys & Aliens

It is nearly impossible to say just how much of Shane was taken to make up Cowboys & Aliens since both films make so much use of the same basic elements of the western.
Geography of Shane is much more limited since nearly all of the action takes place within view of the town, where as Cowboys & Aliens provides us with a wider range.
The cattle baron as the dark character may possibly be attributed to Shane, but modified to become one of the heroes.
In Shane, farmer and cattleman represent two great ways of life clashing. In this film, the cattle baron – the former military man – dominates a town that was once thought to be a mining town. While he and his son lord over the locals, it is not with the same clash of cultures.
Three elements are likely taken from Shane, however, the funeral scene, the Jake riding off into the blue horizon, and, of course, the dog.
In both films, the funeral becomes hugely symbolic in the need to pay respects to the dead. While in Shane, it becomes the focus of resistance, much in the way Irish funerals did in the feud against British oppression, in Cowboys & Aliens, the scene is used to continue the duality of mortal and immortal life that makes up the continuing religious theme.
The dog in this film looks very much like the dog that plays an important role in Shane, one of the beasts which lends realism to the western scene, and provides a kind of witness to the events. The dog plays a similar role in this film.
And, of course, the ride off at the end of both films is nearly identical. Strangely enough, it has a similar meaning. In Shane, the hero cannot escape his past as a violent gunfighter, telling the boy that it is impossible to live in peace with the killing he needed to do. We get a similar allusion in Cowboys & Aliens. In both films, the hero is denied the woman he loves. In Shane, he leaves because the woman he loves is married to another man, in Cowboys & Aliens, the woman he loves is dead.