![]() ![]() Dec 19, 2017 Christian Bale is the rare actor who can say more with his eyes than many others can with a dozen for-your-consideration monologues, and his work in Scott. An impeccable opening, and an impeccable ending - Hostiles is a good film that would have benefited greatly from a trimmed duration. Super Reviewer. Scott Cooper's 19th-century Western drama 'Hostiles,' starring Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike, offers an echo of hope amid the darkness. More Hostiles Film images. Hostiles is a 2017 American period western film written and directed by Scott Cooper, based on a story by Donald E. It stars Christian Bale. It wasn’t long ago that history and old movies would have us believe that the settlers of the West were righteous, God-fearing people surrounded by savage, rampaging Native Americans. In reality, the American dream is much darker, with bigotry, lying and killing stretching back to the founding of the country, and before. Seen in that light, “Hostiles,” Scott Cooper’s mournful meditation on human nature, is more than a revisionist Western; it’s a film that explores the roots of racism and the cost of redemption. Starting out in 1892 New Mexico, “Hostiles” sets up a stalemate between soldiers and Native Americans who instinctively despise and distrust each other with no hope in sight. Not accidentally, it’s a situation that echoes any number of current standoffs in this country that are locked in place by blind hatred. Watch Video: The long march from New Mexico to Montana starts when career officer Captain Joseph Blocker (Bale), on the verge of retirement after serving his country for 20 years, is ordered to escort ailing Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) to his ancestral Cheyenne burial grounds to die in peace. After a lifetime of battling Native Americans, and having many of his men slaughtered by them, it is not an assignment Blocker wants. But it is an order that comes from the top, the President of the United States himself. (Something that wouldn’t happen today.) So to preserve his honorable record and pension, Blocker grudgingly accepts the mission. It is not long before the slow, sad line of men and indigenous persons on horseback encounters its first killings. A group of renegade Comanche has brutally slaughtered a farmer and his three young children, with only the farmer’s wife Rosalie (Rosamund Pike) making a narrow and suspenseful escape. The grief-stricken widow joins the company for her own safety, and the rest of the film is the story of the calamitous and bloody journey through the heartland of America. Also Read: Life in these parts is like moving through a lower rung of hell in that it continues to repeat itself, one death at a time. First the renegade Comanche must be hunted down and wiped out; then Rosalie and Yellow Hawk’s daughter-in-law Elk Woman (Q’orianka Kilcher, “The New World”) are abducted by fur trappers and must be rescued by Blocker and his men, precipitating more violence. At an Army post pit-stop, the company takes on a prisoner (Ben Foster) to be delivered for court-martial for ax-murdering a family of Native Americans. He is unrepentant, and when he escapes, he proves it: His actions provide the first stirrings of awareness for Blocker. But the death that moves him to tears is that of his friend and longtime sidekick Metz (Rory Cochrane, “Argo”), who can’t take any more killing and goes off on a literal suicide mission. Also Read: Blocker is a simple man, on some level a stereotype, who has learned to take orders. It’s his job to kill, and all the killing has hardened him. But beneath the mustache that hides his mouth and feelings is a person of conscience. The beauty of “Hostiles” is that seemingly irredeemable people change, while others don’t. With deliberate pacing, Cooper (“Black Mass,” “Out of the Furnace”) and editor Tom Cross (“La La Land”) creates the rhythms of broken lives. One isn’t so much swept up as lured in.
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