America’s past is pock-marked with cruelty, blood and deceit, and while more and more films and movies (“1883,” “Killers Of The Flower Moon,” “Power Of The Dog,” et al) have tried to show that reality in recent years, actually sitting down to watch bullets fly, bones break and entire populations get wiped out can still feel like a Hollywood gut-punch. Is it entertaining to plop down on the couch to watch a few hours of death after death, rape and religious genocide?
“American Primeval” certainly thinks so. The new six-part Netflix series helmed by “Friday Night” Lights director Peter Berg and written by “The Revenant’s” Mark L. Smith, “American Primeval” revels in its own muck. A fictionalized account of life out west around the 1857 Utah War, which pitted the U.S. Army against Brigham Young’s Mormon militia, “American Primeval” is a dirty but delicate web of intrigue and brutality sparked by a mother and child’s quest to find safety and escape a bounty.
Betty Gilpin and Preston Mota star as that mother and son, Sara and Devin Rowell, and endure countless injustices over the course of the series, from the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which masked Mormons and Paiute auxiliaries killed about 120 Westbound pioneers, to wolf attacks, deathly cold and abuse at the hands of sinister French madmen. That’s not even getting into downright evil bounty hunters, broken bones, bucking horses and all of the pair’s everyday trauma, a mere fraction of which would force most of us modern citizens into a shuddering ball.
That’s not to say they don’t have help. Taylor Kitsch plays Isaac, a white man raised by the Shoshone who’s so emotionally shut down after the death of his own family that he practically communicates in grunts. He begrudgingly ends up helping the Rowells and a mute Shoshone girl, Shawnee Pourier’s Two Moons, with the foursome forming a rather motley crew along their route west.
There’s other drama elsewhere in “American Primeval,” as well, like Shea Whigham’s Jim Bridger attempting to hold things down at his historic fort in Wyoming despite looming threats from Brigham Young (Kim Coates) and his Mormon mercenaries, and the plight of a young Mormon couple, Jacob and Abish Pratt (Dane DeHaan and Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who are separated (and scalped) during the Meadows Massacre and spend the rest of the series trying to find each other. While Jacob is hell-bent on finding his wife, Abish ends up falling in with the Shoshone group that took her, finding common ground with Derek Hinkey’s Red Feather, a fierce warrior, and his mother, Irene Bedard’s Winter Bird. As Abish, Lightfoot-Leon gets to deliver some of the show’s most uncloaked moral messages, speaking out against hatred, fear and killing under the guise of religion.
Much of the on-screen violence of “American Primeval” was created with practical effects, a fact that’s both impressive and somewhat horrific given what viewers end up seeing. Shot over about six months in the New Mexico wilderness, often in intense cold, the show does seem to radiate strife, along with a sort of itchy, dirty woolen feeling. There are no beautiful, sweeping vistas or shots of wildflowers before they’re trampled by oxen.
Berg and Smith’s on-screen vision is all pain with very little relief, making a binge-watch of this series a bit of a masochistic exercise. Knowing that the show employed an enormous amount of help to ensure what it captured was as real as possible, including indigenous cultural consultants and Mormon and military experts, is impressive but almost makes things worse.
There’s no Hollywood sugar-coating these atrocities, and watching “American Primeval” will only serve to make you more aware of how much mud, blood and brutal, overconfident delusion it took to create the country we live in today.
“American Primeval” is now streaming on Netflix.