scott cooper is the michael bay of Serious American Dramas, his stories essentially as complex as bay's boots-on-the-ground vs. liberal pussies but done in the only style he knows how: the laborious macho art weepy. this time he does the Good Colonialist story, where the white man's burden and guilt has a chance to act out extreme violence, not that it matters because the only thing cooper knows how to do is get otherwise good performers to mumble about rote emotions and Important Issues and move slowly—bale, at least, is suited to the grumbly macho cry and comes out looking fine but rosamund pike is next level awful in this. nearly every scene in this is like the third act…

Cormac McCarthy’s western epic Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is an obtuse and nearly insurmountable story to commit to screen, and I have my doubts that if it ever is produced that it will properly encapsulate the themes and poetic depth of that novel. But I can appreciate when a movie scratches the surface, and Hostiles is definitely one of those films. In it, Christian Bale is a U.S. Cavalry officer tasked with escorting a Cheyenne war chief back to his tribal home in Montana before the chief succumbs to cancer. To make things worse, the two of them had been at Wounded Knee, and there is a deep-seated hatred stemming from decades of violence that…

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Infused within those iconic stars and stripes are nearly 300 years of pain. Pain of the immeasurable sort, unleashed on practically every walk of life; the likes of Natives, Colonists and Immigrants have all seen their fair share. Yet amidst all that pain, what America has yet to experience in metaphysical droves is unity. Sure, it arrives in fleeting spurts, often cultivated in the aftermath of tragedy. Even so, as pain occasionally acts as a conduit for unity, it dissipates as said tragedies fade into eventual irrelevance. As tragedies come and go, and America experiences short-lived fads of togetherness, how can We The People transcend this temporal misfortune? 

“Sometimes I envy the finality of death. The certainty. 
I have…

"Sometimes I envy the finality of death. The certainty. And I have to drive those thoughts away when I'm weak."

Hostiles is brilliant. Truly brilliant.

Scott Cooper crafts together a masterpiece that has affected me in a way I've never quite experienced. Right from the opening scene alone, I got this weird feeling. This feeling that this film was tailor made for me. This is my kind of movie. A story of forgiveness and vengeance in a gorgeous western style. This film pulls no emotional punches. While the violence is gritty and brutal, it isn't glorified like with a Tarantino film. It is treated as a necessary evil. A duty this group of tortured men must follow through with, so…