HOSTILES (2017): An Art-Film Western

(No SPOILERS if you see a lot of movies.)

I was strongly moved several times during Scott Cooper's HOSTILES's 134 minutes, but more often impressed with the artistry of the composition and cutting ("montage"), with Christian Bale's accent and tone-perfect delivery — and with his ability to pop a head-vein, so to speak, on cue; with the thematically-appropriate costuming and hair styling; and with the nuanced handling of classic narrative premises and tropes of The Largely-Lethal Journey ("Red-Shirts" + "Pvt. Deadmeat") and Family Destruction and Re-Construction.
On the other hand, it was the first time I'd seen the movie, and I was still spending a lot of my time thinking like the cinema critic for an arty little magazine use editor liked words like "filmic."
According to the 1960 or so textbook based on the official US Army history of the US Army, the "Indian Wars" leading up to the 1892 setting for HOSTILES were the "nadir" — that's where I learned the word — of US military history; and the full-bird/bull-goose Colonel who taught the course thought our text soft on George Armstrong Custer and the Army's war crimes (the term he used) generally. But I wouldn't have taken a course in US military history if not forced the first time — I took it again to avoid Map Reading (which I really, really, *really* should have taken) — and most Americans "ain't gonna study war" in an academic sense. So HOSTILES does useful political work in showing this side of the US cavalry's coming to the ethnic cleansing, and at the same time not sentimentalizing the First Peoples here, and taking a nasty swipe at those who do. 
As Peter Debruge points out in VARIETY, the Indians in the film remain abstract and in service to the story. But the same abstraction holds with most of the Whites when moved around for impressive shot-composition.
So: I'll recommend HOSTILES and hope it makes money. It's still politically useful — given the low level of White awareness of the gory details of "the Conquest of the West" — and it is beautifully made. Perhaps too beautiful over too many minutes.

Post-Post-Script on "Chemical Weapons" (3 Sept. 2013)

            I usually speak ill of the concept that "chemical weapons" are especially horrible, as military weapons go, and put "chemical weapons" in quotation marks since, obviously, trinitrotoluene (TNT) and its descendants such as C4, white phosphorus, napalm, and, for that matter gun powder are based in chemistry. 

Still —
            Still, poison gas is special. It is special not because it's a weapon of mass destruction or "a poor man's a-bomb" but because it's a small-time oppressor's Cossacks or NKVD or Waffen SS or Gestapo, or gun boats or US cavalry in the West during the Indian wars — the "nadir" of US Army history according to my old US Army history of the US Army — or whatever the British would have called the army units assigned to "administrative massacres" in the old Raj if the British had implemented that particularly obscene scheme to maintain control in India.

            Poison gas is special because it allows small-time dictators to use old technology to perform with "surgical precision," relatively speaking, punitive and terror operations that major powers like the US can now do with cruise missiles and drones.

            Only gas is better — i.e., superior for getting the evil job done — than Hellfire missiles or a gunboat attack, or even sending in the Cossacks.

            Poison gas isn't a weapon of mass destruction in large part because it isn't a weapon of destruction at all: it kills or at least horribly hurts and incapacitates people while leaving infrastructure intact. Moreover, gas kills people with potential deniability, or at least more deniability than sending in the Marines to kill Filipino insurrectionists who wanted the Philippines for Filipinos — or the Cossacks and Black Hundreds into some shtetl Czarist authorities wanted to keep in line. (More loosely-controlled domestic terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan also allowed deniability, but that's a somewhat different story, including the point that a lot of US politicians into my lifetime wouldn't bother denying supporting the KKK.)

            Cruise missiles and drones, like 19^th-century gunboats, allow major powers to punish weak states by launching lethal attacks against them from a safe distance. Such attacks don't kill off many "enemies" — the quotation marks here are inherited from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness — but they also don't risk one's own fighters. Using poison gas against "soft targets" such as one's own civilian population is also safe.
            And, like gunboats, cruise missiles, and drones, for such reasons poison gas is tempting: very tempting since poison gas is relatively cheap and within the budget and technological or shopping abilities of all but the least of dictators.

            So let us all support the international conventions against poison gas. At the same time, though, let us avoid making fashionable again the whole idea of gunboat diplomacy: making "rogue states" behave by punishing them by killing off some of their people, from a safe distance.


            The Great Power arrogance of the 19^th century was very bad in itself, and in the 20^th century produced results that were horrendous.