In case the title didn't hit you over the head, the idea is that everyone is hostile (read: in America, in 1892, in the West, when we're different).
It's not a bad Western, really. Our brooding leading man (Christian Bale) is a captain, eager for retirement, who is commissioned on a last mission: Take the dying Cheyenne war chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) from New Mexico to his home in Montana. Despite his hatred of the man and his tribe, he is forced to undertake the journey. Not long after, his party comes across a woman (Rosamund Pike) whose family has been slaughtered by Comanches. More episodes follow as the journey becomes an adventure, many people die, many people kill, and a few even fall in love.
What else do you want from a Western? It's pretty typical stuff, though perhaps heavier than usual fare. Hostiles sets up a premise, helped by its marketing campaign, of more subversive themes that it never fully embraces. Just look at the poster, below: the cast, in grayscale to mute their skin colors into neutrality, superimposed over a colorful (if faded and torn) national flag. And then there's the tagline, "We are all...Hostiles", which suggests an almost Tarantino-esque aesthetic of "whodunnit...don't care...bang bang blood". But the film itself doesn't really play into these moral issues and curiously avoids some of the deeper thematic horrors that are as timely in 2018 as they were in 1892.
What exactly do I mean? Spoiler alert: Everybody dies. Well, everybody except the two main white people and a young Cheyenne boy who we last see on his way to white school, where we know the "Indian" will be burned out of him until he becomes "civilized". All the natives are butchered by white men, though most of the white men are then killed as well. Out of the three women in the story, two are native women with almost no voice at all who are senselessly murdered in the penultimate sequence. The third is the white woman who spends most of the film crying and shaking over the traumatizing deaths of her husband and children, unable to do much; she regains some impressive agency, especially her prowess with a gun, though ultimately we know she shouldn't have survived even a day without rescue by a hunky man. Right?
Then there's the film's ending, which ignores all the horrors of Westward expansion in favor of a love story. After the woman and child hop on a train back to Chicago, tearfully saying goodbye to the man who had saved them and she especially had grown attracted to, we see the captain also hop on the back of their train, the indication being that he, retired, will go start a life with them. What a lovely story about the inevitable death of Native cultures and the picture-perfect ways the beautiful white people responsible can live happily ever after, far away from the frontier they've washed with blood.
It's not all bad, to be sure. The gorgeous score and amazing cinematography make this film a pleasure to behold. An interesting and dynamic cast keep things really riveting, especially Rosamund Pike, who works damn hard to milk what the screenplay gave her for all its worth. And director Scott Cooper (Black Mass, Out of the Furnace) shows us again that his style is promising, if not yet excellent. Hostiles is, ultimately, watchable, if politically void, thematically problematic, and one of the longest, slowest, most serious movies you'll see this month.
IMDb: Hostiles
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