Netflix’s 'American Primeval': A brutal and bleak Western saga - VIDEO

Netflix's latest Western series, American Primeval, offers an unforgiving and grim portrayal of life on the frontier.

In its six-episode limited run, the show spares no brutality, with themes of murder, rape, mayhem, and suicide running throughout its narrative,News.Az reports, citing Forbes.

The harsh world of the frontier is only outmatched by the ruthless individuals who inhabit it: treacherous Mormon settlers, merciless Native American tribes, and self-serving bounty hunters. Amidst this chaos, a few resilient men and women struggle to survive, fighting for their lives in a land dominated by malice and violence.

“Primeval” refers to a time before history, to the earliest days of humankind, and evokes a certain sense of raw primitiveness. It’s a fitting title for a series about the American frontier at its bloodiest and least romantic.

“There’s a difference between civilization and civilized,” Shea Whigham's character, Jim Bridger, tells Betty Gilpin’s Sara Rowell, when she finds herself at Fort Bridger, surrounded by violent and unpredictable men. “You should go back to Boston where there’s more of both.”



There are two almost entirely distinct stories at play in American Primeval. The first follows Sara and Isaac on their harrowing flight across the mountains of the Utah territory, through snowy forests filled with wolves and bandits, accompanied by the young Native girl, Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier) on the run from her own tragic life. Everyone here has a tragic past behind them, and most have a tragic future waiting just around the river bend.

In the second main storyline we are immersed in the violent, bloody conflict known as the Mormon War that took place in 1857-1858 in what is now Utah and Wyoming. In this conflict, Sons of Anarchy alum Kim Coates plays LDS leader, Brigham Young, portrayed here as a ruthless, fanatical villain who will stop at nothing to establish a home for his people.

The events are loosely based on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which saw Mormon militiamen of the Utah Territorial Militia, or Nauvoo Legion, slaughter at least 120 members of the Baker-Fancher wagon train. In some details, the show follows history quite closely. The militiamen hire Paiutes and make the attack look like the work of Native Americans. The actual battle that ensued lasted days, but in the show it’s over in minutes. In both, the militia kills witnesses in order to cover up the slaughter, though many liberties are taken here, including the advent of a number of fictional characters who survive the assault. In the show, Brigham Young is chief architect of all hostilities, whereas there remains debate among historians and scholars over his involvement in the historical record.

No matter, we aren’t meant to watch American Primeval as a true-to-history retelling of events, but rather as a kind of parable on the brutality of man, the ways prejudice and misunderstanding and fear and greed can bring out the worst in us, and occasionally the best.

The Shoshone tribe has its share of violent warriors, but overall they’re portrayed as brave and honorable people who simply want to be left alone by all the white settlers, Mormon or otherwise. Captain Dellinger of the US Army is an honorable man who only seeks the truth, and whose writing is filled with hope for a better future. Isaac Reed, however lost he is to the world, is a courageous and compassionate man who risks everything to help perfect strangers. Same with Two Moons. And Whigham steals every scene he’s in as the affable, world-weary Bridger.

Abish Pratt (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) plays a young Mormon woman who survives the Meadows Massacre and is taken in—at first against her will—by Shoshone brave, Red Feather (Derek Hinkey).

News.Az