'Cowboys and Aliens': Our battle of the genre mashup

Cowboys and aliens: They're indelible pop-cultural icons that have captured the imaginations of audiences since the earliest days of movies.

In the comic book adaptation "Cowboys and Aliens," director Jon Favreau fuses these seminal figures on the big screen, as a 19th-century Arizona sheriff (Harrison Ford) and loner (Daniel Craig) battle extraterrestrial invaders.

With the film opening Friday, we've compared cowboys with aliens to determine which we'd like to win this epic cinematic battle - if it wasn't scripted, of course.

Butt-kicking factor
There have been some tough real-life cowboys, such as Wyatt Earp, and John Wayne wasn't a man you'd want to mess with. But aliens benefit from limitless extraterrestrial powers that could easily outmatch even the hardiest of bad-boy gunslingers. Winner: Aliens

Bling
Cowboys sport shiny spurs and guns. Aliens have night-illuminating spaceships and an assortment of sleek futuristic tchotchkes. Winner: Aliens

Weapons
We'll have to narrowly give this one to cowboys, on the leap-of-faith notion that they're such good shots with their trusty six-guns that they'd wipe out their alien counterparts before the latter could reach for their ray guns (or whatever the alien weapon-of-choice might be). Winner: Cowboys

Leading lady
Sigourney Weaver carries the mantle for aliens, having killed a good number of them over the course of four "Alien" movies. We've seen many notable western heroines, plus plenty of legendary real-life women of the West, but in a battle, Ellen Ripley trumps all. Winner: Aliens

Best movie
It's just about impossible to pick the best western ever made, and almost equally impossible to pinpoint one movie about aliens that stands above the pack. "The Searchers," "E.T.," "Once Upon a Time in the West," "District 9" ... the list goes on and on. Tie.