A new Netflix series breaks 'with the historical record in ways that may bemuse the average viewer but will likely displease any Latter-day Saints,' a New York Times reviewer says.
Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin star in a Netflix mini-series about the brutal, brutal West.In the catalog of the modern Western, a lot of space is given to stories focused on what is assumed to have been the sheer miserableness of life on the frontier. Viscous carpets of mud. Frigid snowscapes. Scalpings. Rapes. The sibilant impact of arrows puncturing flesh.
It’s a period when settlers, displaced tribes and the U.S. Army all skirmished for land and authority in the recently established Utah Territory. And Smith wants to use it as a stage for something sprawling and meaningful — the latest pronouncement on how savage the supposedly civilized become when the chips are down.
What’s left is the sometimes orgiastic brutality — no different from the violence in the kind of low-rent entertainment “American Primeval” wants to separate itself from — and the manifold formulas of the Western. With the exception of Whigham’s puckish, entertaining Bridger, the trappers, soldiers, bounty hunters and militiamen feel like extras from one Sam Peckinpah film or another.
Kitsch’s skill at playing bottled-up anguish and ardor is what his role should call for, but Isaac is a strong-and-silent caricature, too hollow to give Kitsch very much to communicate. It doesn’t help that the story is overstuffed and overcomplicated, circling back and forth from the fugitives’ flight to the jockeyings of the settlers and the Army to the plight of the Shoshone.