American Primeval, Netflix review - nightmare on the Wild Frontier

It seems The Osmonds may not have been the worst outrage perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by the Mormons. American Primeval is set in the 1850s, and is based around the real-life massacre of settlers travelling from Arkansas to California by the Mormon militia known as as the Nauvoo Legion. This took place at Mountain Meadows, Utah, apparently triggered by rising tensions between the US federal government and Mormon leader Brigham Young.

Directed by Peter Berg (Deepwater Horizon, Lone Survivor etc) and created by screenwriter Mark L Smith (Twisters, The Revenant), American Primeval uses this real-life background to drive a brutal story of struggle and survival in an epic but pitiless landscape. One imagines that Berg and Smith pictured this horrific event as a kind of metaphor for the creation of the United States, as it dragged itself out of the formless, lawless wilderness into some semblance of civilisation, with plenty of collateral damage along the way. Actually it was shot in New Mexico rather than Utah, but the hi-def, widescreen scenery is breathtaking in its lonely grandeur.Against the historic backdrop, the narrative is played out by a group of disparate characters thrown together by the repercussions of the massacre. At Fort Bridger, a staging post for the travellers, we meet the eponymous boss Jim Bridger, played with wry and whiskery knowingness by Shea Whigham. Fort Bridger is a bit of a roughhouse, with plenty of drinking and fighting and a corpse dangling from the gateway, but compared to the endless plains and forbidding mountains rearing up in the distance it’s like the Beverly Hills Hilton. However, the scheming Brigham Young (Kim Coates, pictured above, left with Alex Breaux) is keen to buy Bridger out for his own nefarious purposes – in this telling, the sinister, smirking Young is pretty much the devil incarnate – and he’s not going to take no for an answer.

Similarly, Young’s pitiless militia are depicted as a kind of Waffen SS of the wild frontier, prepared to commit any atrocities to shore up their Mormon empire and not fussy about killing either European settlers or members of the local tribes. The Paiute indians are allies of the Mormons, but are used to deflect attention from Young’s murderous riders, who wear hoods to disguise their identities. By comparison to this bunch, the Shoshone tribe are presented as beacons of reasonableness and rationality, not least because they have a female chief whose first instinct is not to reach for a gun and start murdering people.Amid all this, we join Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin), who’s come from Philadelphia with her young son Devin (Preston Mota), aiming to rejoining her husband out here in the wilds. There’s also Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan), an earnest Mormon heading west with his young wife Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), and Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier, pictured above), a young indigenous girl who clings for survival to Sara and Devin. For good measure, a few miles behind them on the trail are some merciless bounty-hunters.

But we need a hero, and he appears in the shape of lone mountain man Isaac. He’s played with monosyllabic stoicism by Taylor Kitsch, and we gradually learn the back story which has brought him to his isolated existence in the frozen forest. He’s the epitome of the strong, silent type, and possesses an almost supernatural instinct for the land and its natural inheritors.

It’s a gruelling tale littered with episodes of hideous violence, where arrows whizz at light speed out of nowhere and hit people in the eye, victims are dispatched with knives, tomahawks and of course bullets, and if you’re not careful you might get devoured by wolves. One character gets scalped and has to undergo excruciating emergency surgery, ending up resembling Utah’s own Frankenstein’s monster. But the interlocking narratives gradually tighten their grip, all building up to a climax which ambushes you with a sudden surge of emotion. Not bad at all.

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