![]() ![]() The film is set in 1892, and Blocker is a veteran of America’s ongoing wars in the newly settled West. And since this is a movie directed by Scott Cooper ( Black Mass, Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace), the best way for everyone to learn those lessons is through scenes of gritty violence. But though the film seeks to avoid many of the genre’s cliches, it nonetheless ends up slipping into some well-worn and dull dynamics of noble Indians teaching important lessons to their American occupiers. Hostiles is a classic revisionist western, stripping away the traditional notions of good guys and bad guys on the American frontier and instead digging into the poisonous effect of decades of colonial warfare against the continent’s indigenous peoples. Both sequences are gory, tough to watch, and short on dialogue, with Cooper intent on showing a world severely lacking in empathy. In the second, the hard-faced Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) rounds up an Apache family and drags them to an American fort, where other Native Americans have been imprisoned for years without trial. In the first, a white family living deep in New Mexico Territory are attacked by a Comanche war party, with only the mother, Rosalie (Rosamund Pike), surviving. The first two scenes of Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s harsh and uncompromising western, depict a familiar cycle of cruelty. ![]()
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