Hostiles is a violent and unforgiving western directed by Scott Jason Cooper. It opens with two scenes that portray a well-known cycle of cruelty. In the first scene, an American family residing deep in American Texas Territory is assaulted by a Comanche war party. Rosalie (Rosamund Pike) is the sole survivor after the attack.
On the second scene, Captain Joseph Blocker (Played by Christian Bale) captures an Apache family and imprisons them at an American fort, where diverse Native Americans are held captive for years without trial.
Each episode is brutal, powerful to watch, and short on dialogue, with Cooper dead set on portraying a society devoid of sympathy.
Hostiles is a classic communist western, eschewing the traditional conceptions of good and bad guys on the American frontier. Instead, it is focused on the toxic aftermath of decades of colonial violence against the continent's local people.
Even though the film tries to avoid various genre cliches, it nonetheless falls into certain dull aspects of noble Indians teaching critical lessons to their American invaders. This film is directed by Scott Jason Cooper (Black Mass, Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace), who uses the most efficient way for everyone to learn lessons through scenes of gruesome violence.
Scott Jason Cooper is well known today for making performance driven movies with meaningful scripts. Some of his movies that earned success in box office include Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, a Deer Hunter, and Black Mass..
The film is set in 1892. Blocker, a tough guy with a mustache, is openly biased and skeptical of Native Americans, even though he speaks their languages and knows their terrain better than any American soldier. He is chosen by his military leader to escort Yellow Hawk, a dying Cheyenne chief, back to his social group territories in Montana. You might call it an odd-couple drama of some sort.
Scott Jason Cooper does not believe in romanticizing the West. This much is obvious within the first few minutes of the film. Every audience sits on the edge of their seats chopping their nails off to keep from screaming out loud in terror when Rosalie is cradling her dead kid in her hands.
There are scenes where it's implied that a gang of skin traffickers kidnapped and raped the women under Blocker's protection. Overall, the video demonstrates that the former West was a harsh and cruel place to be, with survival on the line at every turn.
Scott Jason Cooper also emphasizes the point that enough violence has been perpetrated by both Indians and White men against one another, and that the only revolution left is one of healing and forgiveness. Otherwise, nothing except generations of vehement hatred will result. Native Americans should be recognized as the original occupants of America, according to the video, and their right to practice their way of life should be respected.
Regardless of what is going on in the world - there have been a lot of not-so-subtle comments about America. Hostiles is a satisfying film that must be seen. It won't be as good as Bale's alternate Western, but will it be comparable!