Set in 1892, Hostiles tells the story of a legendary Army Captain (Christian Bale), who after stern resistance, reluctantly agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back to tribal lands. Making the harrowing and perilous journey from Fort Berringer, an isolated Army outpost in New Mexico, to the grasslands of Montana, the former rivals encounter a young widow (Rosamund Pike), whose family was murdered on the plains. Together, they must join forces to overcome the punishing landscape, hostile Comanche and vicious outliers that they encounter along the way.
By turns deliberative and chaotic, brutal and merciful, definitely bleak and just maybe hopeful, Hostiles could have ended with its penultimate scene, but it would have been a very different movie.
Works as a contrived but effective parable of the American West, its painful legacy, and small measures of redemption...But our focus frustratingly remains on the white people and Blocker's struggle to reach empathy...
Cooper's reach may exceed his grasp with Hostiles, which is never as incisive or as profound as it often wants to be. But he's made a movie that says America can never come to terms with its divisive hate-filled present unless it finally faces its past.
What truly results, in a meaningful way, is an understanding that neither side can claim to be morally absolute. There is no right or wrong, no sense of things being purely black or white.
There's a good movie here, but it's buried by too many attempts to be something it's not, most egregiously some kind of great dramatic examination of our treatment of Native Americans.