January 4, 2018 2 min to read

Hostiles

Hostiles is deeply unplesant on purpose, but I'm unsure what that purpose is...

by Zach Saul

Hostiles is a beautiful visual experience, but a very unpleasant emotional experience. Headlined by an A-list cast including Chrisian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and actor of the moment Timothee Chalamet (the man has been in close to every movie the last 18 months), this is a weakly written script about a powerful subject matter. Hostiles gets-by for much of the movie on gorgeous cinematography and a healthy dose of moral ambiguity. The problem is its crescendos feel forced, and when tragedy strikes (as it does every twenty minutes or so) it feels aggrandized instead of explained. The movie deserves a lot of credit for attempting to tell a nuanced story about racism and native Americans in the 1800s - but the screenplay fails to paint any of the characters with enough depth for their plights to resonate fully.

I think tragic narratives are successful when they insight a change (positive or negative) in their victims, environment or assailants and I found the stasis of Hostiles’ protagonists to be maddening. The movie version of Captain Blocker was portrayed as a profoundly noble captain with a complicated past. This past is referenced several times and we get our fair share of shots of Christian Bale staring pensively into the sunset. It’s curious that the screenwriters leave so much meat on the bone in regards to his transgressions - and it’s unclear if they were trying to glorify Blocker, or if Hostiles was intended as more of a perspective-driven narrative. Even though the real-life events on which Hostiles was based were monumental - the film version felt inconsequential. The most compelling character was Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike) because she broke from the stoic, affectless playbook and struggled with the tragedies she witnessed. I realize that to some extent this stoicism was a stylistic choice by Scott Cooper, and a form of realism - it just didn’t resonate.

The Good: Hostiles is beautifully filmed, and for the first half of the movie - well paced. Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike both gave admirable performances in an attempt to hold up a weak script and had moments of brilliance. Hostiles also attempts to tackle a really challenging subject matter: racism between the settlers and native Americans - and deserves a nod for taking a swing.

The Bad: Despite the movie visiting transgressions by both native Americans and the white settlers I couldn’t shake the feeling after leaving the theater the native American perspective and characters were under-represented in Hostiles. A clunky screenplay and a gratuitous amount of gory violence don’t do viewers of Hostiles any favors either. To sum up, despite some artistic merit I’m just not sure who this movie is for.