Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Hostiles Blu-ray Movie Review

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 19, 2018

It’s perhaps indicative of just how far so-called “revisionist Westerns” have come that Hostiles begins with a terrifying scene featuring a horde of Comanche warriors slaughtering a homesteader and several of his children. It’s scenes like this, albeit admittedly nowhere near as graphic as this particular opening sequence is, that used to define the old school western, where it was typically cowboys versus Indians (as they were unavoidably called back then), with the Indians displaying signs of inherent “savagery” and the good, civilized cowboys (or others) fighting them off and prevailing, establishing Manifest Destiny for one and all (or at least those of certain non-Native American ethnicities). But Hostiles quickly delivers its own none too subtle message by having the next sequence document a Native American family being violently rounded up (if not slaughtered as in the first vignette) by a bunch of almost nonchalant soldiers headed by Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale). Obviously, Hostiles is making the perhaps over obvious point that hostility tends to work both ways, and it’s that simmering distrust that informs this interesting if occasionally overheated film from writer and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass ). Cooper reunites with his Out of the Furnace star Christian Bale and in a way also traffics in some of the same melancholic emotional ambience that typified their earlier collaboration. Blocker turns out to be the sort of character Bale seems to revel in playing, a basically decent man who has been buffeted by the winds of fate and personal experience to the point that he is both emotionally tamped down and simultaneously ready to explode. Blocker has been fighting the “savages” for untold years and has the scars, both physical and emotional, to prove it, but as he discusses in an early scene with a buddy of his named Metz (Rory Cochrane), he at least is close to being mustered out with a decent pension in store. Metz himself is a Master Sergeant without much left in the way of either a career (his emotional problems have led to him being stripped of weapons) or, frankly, a personal life, and so serves as what might be seen as a warning sign for what may await Blocker if Blocker doesn’t handle his own emotions successfully. Anger management definitely comes into play when Blocker is tasked with one final assignment before retirement, namely escorting an elderly chief named Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) back to his tribal lands in Montana where he’s going to be allowed to die peacefully from cancer after having spent the past several years incarcerated at the New Mexico fort where Blocker has been stationed.

The shocking opening scene of Hostiles actually introduces one of the focal characters, the sole survivor of the Comanche carnage, Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike), who has seen her husband and three children slaughtered in front of her eyes. While the film takes a brief detour to then introduce Blocker and his new assignment, it predictably wends back as Blocker’s company, with Yellow Hawk and his family in tow, surveys the ruins of the Quaid homestead, finding Rosalee still clutching her dead infant to her bosom while making sure everything is kept quiet for her two older children, who are “sleeping”, as she tells a shocked Blocker when he peers inside the burnt out shell of what was once the Quaid farmhouse.

Hostiles begins with a rather odd epigram by D.H. Lawrence (see screenshot 21):

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Now, it’s obvious that Cooper has already highlighted certain aspects of hardness and stoicism in the characters of both Blocker and Rosalee, but he also in my estimation undercuts this depiction with a couple of early post-modernist flourishes which are both presentationally disjunctive as well as at least arguably too melodramatic. The first of these comes when Blocker is informed in no uncertain terms by his superior officer (an underutilized Stephen Lang) that he will escort Yellow Hawk back to Montana, even though Blocker has a long, violent history with the man. Blocker retreats to a field, where it seems like he’s contemplating suicide, and Cooper creates a montage of sorts, with quick dissolves and jiggly cam demonstrating Blocker’s emotional breakdown. Later, when Rosalee is properly introduced, she has her own breakdown as she prepares to bury her family, scraping and scratching at the ground while the soldiers stand by silently (she’s already insisted that she should bury her loved ones). Both of these brief vignettes may have some emotional authenticity to them, but they both come out of nowhere, and seem almost deliberately off kilter. A much later scene involving the death of a major supporting character which brings Blocker to outright tears plays much more naturally and therefore effectively.

Plotwise, Hostiles of course links Rosalee to Blocker, both in terms of their shared road journey, and (perhaps even more predictably) as putative love interests. The overall story progression also proceeds pretty much as expected, with everyone learning to overcome inherent prejudices to see the actual human behind the "type" (so to speak). But there are a number of interesting detours this particular trek takes, including some viscerally disturbing attack scenes which leave a bevy of either wounded or deceased in their wakes, as well as a rather potent emotional subtext involving Yellow Hawk, aged and terminally ill but resilient and consigned to both his recent and inevitably soon coming fates. Studi really shines in this film in a completely, well, stoic and hard way that tends to make some of Bales’ and Pike’s histrionics seem a bit hyperbolic. That said, the core of this story rings true, with Bales’ tendencies toward “mumble core” actually working for this extremely in folded character. If Hostiles perhaps provides a too conveniently happy ending for three characters, it at least has an almost Hamlet sized coterie of victims to help balance the scales.

Hostiles Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hostiles is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Shot on film and finished at a 4K DI, Hostiles looks gorgeously organic on Blu-ray, with stunning depth of field in many huge outdoor (almost Fordian) vistas, and with equally convincing fine detail in the many close-ups, and with a convincing rendering of the fine grain field. The palette is impressively rendered throughout this feature, and everything from the dust coated blues of the soldiers' uniforms to the blood streaked blanket Rosalee shrouds her infant in are vividly realized and authentic looking. My one qualm with this presentation, and it's a stylistic one, is the use of dusky lighting and jiggly cam to try to evoke a roiling psychological state (see screenshot 11), something that intentionally introduces quite a bit of softness and which also understandably depletes detail levels.

Hostiles Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hostiles features an impressive sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that tends to ping pong back and forth between big sonic moments like the opening Comanche attack and quieter dialogue scenes. Through it all, though, there's a glut of ambient environmental effects wafting through the surround channels since virtually the entire film takes place outside. Max Richter, quickly becoming one of my favorite film composers after delighting me with his recordings like his "reimagining" of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, provides an elegiac and moving score which also fills the side and rear channels invitingly. Dialogue (including some Native American dialects, with subtitles) is always rendered cleanly and clearly on this very enjoyable track.

Hostiles Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• A Journey of the Soul: The Making of Hostiles (1080p; 1:06:03) is a nicely done multi part in-depth series of featurettes that offer some excellent (and decidedly scenic in some cases) interviews as well as a glut of production data.

Hostiles Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I perhaps focused a bit more on a few slight perceived shortcomings in Hostiles than my colleague Brian Orndorf did, but, that said, this is a hugely impressive film with some knockout performances and absolutely jaw dropping scenery. Lionsgate has provided a Blu-ray with top notch technical merits and a well done (if singular) supplement. Highly recommended.