American Primeval review: a bloody Netflix Western full of wasted potential

American Primeval is a sprawling, epic TV series, one that feels both deeply indebted to the Westerns of old and a purposeful rebuke of them. Present still are the genre’s John Ford-esque cloudless skies, which stretch endlessly just like the series’ plains and mountain ranges, but gone are their technicolor vibrance. The latter trait has been replaced by American Primeval director Peter Berg with a greatly desaturated color palette that frequently drains the Western of practically any identifiable colors outside of black and gray, and which is designed to reflect the brutality and darkness of The Revenant writer Mark L. Smith’s scripts.

Unimpressed by the violence of past Westerns, American Primeval sets out to capture in grueling detail the numerous physical challenges and unrelenting dangers of the uncolonized American West. It uses the real-life Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which over 100 settlers were murdered by the members of a zealous Mormon militia and the Southern Paiute Native Americans they hired to help them do it, as its inciting incident. From there, it tells a story of how America’s Western colonies broke many of its prospective colonizers and were, in turn, broken like untamed horses by the interests of several controlling, greedy factions.

American Primeval is, therefore, a decidedly and purposefully unromantic portrait of the West that hopes to shine greater light on some of the lesser-known, horrendous injustices that were carried out in the name of Manifest Destiny. At times, it manages to do just that, and quite effectively, too. The Netflix original is a frustrating contradiction, though. It may carry itself as a no-nonsense Western, but it is littered with some of the genre’s weakest and most tired clichés. These pile up across its later installments until American Primeval has been rendered dramatically inert, like a wagon stuck in wet mud. The show’s makers may know exactly where they want to go with it, but their missteps leave the series painfully lurching in place.

American Primeval‘s opening scenes follow Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin), a headstrong woman, and her son Devin (Preston Mota) as they arrive in 1857 Utah on a train from Boston and make their way to the territory’s first and safest outpost, Fort Bridger. There, they meet the fort’s builder and mountain-man owner, Jim Bridger (a scene-stealing Shea Whigham), who tries unsuccessfully to dissuade Sara from trying to reach her distant “husband” in the prospecting town of Crooks Springs, which lies on the other side of a nearby, treacherous mountain range. When his subsequent efforts to convince Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch), a gruff scout habitually covered in rags, to guide Sara and Devin to their destination fail, Sara persuades Jacob (Dane DeHaan) and Abish Pratt (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a young pair of Mormon newlyweds, to let her and Devin join them on a nearby wagon train.

Jacob, Sara, Abish, and Devin’s journey is upended when a group of Mormon militiamen don white hoods and massacre the entire wagon train in an effort to help their leader, Brigham Young (Kim Coates), keep all non-Mormon settlers from traveling into their growing “Zion” of Utah. Behind the camera, Berg constructs this sequence out of a series of canted, handheld oners that make the horrifying violence that unfolds throughout simultaneously all the more legible and unnerving. The attack’s brutality and chaotic visual quality make it a rare piece of stomach-churning TV spectacle the likes of which most viewers have likely only seen elsewhere on Game of Thrones, which also frequently succeeded at capturing both the sickening carnage and cinematic scope of its on-the-ground battles.

At the end of American Primeval‘s recreated Mountain Meadows Massacre, Sara and Devin are rescued by Kitsch’s reluctant, emotionally guarded Isaac, while Jacob and Abish are separated. The former is left wounded by a partial scalping and forced to unwittingly team up with his Mormon attackers to look for his wife; the latter ends up a prisoner first of the Paiute and then of a vengeful Shoshone warrior and leader named Red Feather (a dignified but underserved Derek Hinkey). Across its six episodes, American Primeval follows its five principal leads as they try to reach their respective destinations, all while expanding its scope to encompass the growing tensions between the U.S. military and Brigham Young’s hostile followers and the quest undertaken by a gruff mercenary named Virgil Cutter (Jai Courtney) to capture a bounty that has been placed on Sara’s head for reasons that become gradually clear. American Primeval, which was written entirely by Smith, does its best to balance all of these storylines, but some inevitably prove stronger and more compelling than others.

Sara and Devin’s journey with Isaac is buoyed by Gilpin and Kitsch’s capable, unwavering performances. The long-brewing conflicts between American Primeval‘s Mormon faction and its “enemies” are also rendered both riveting and unsettling by Brigham Young’s infuriating, repeated attempts at strong-arming Jim Bridger into giving up his fort and by the impassioned efforts of a good-hearted U.S. military Captain named Dellinger (Lucas Neff) to hold Young and his followers accountable for their savage, unlawful deeds. American Primeval, however, finds far less success in Jacob and Abish’s diverging paths. Jacob’s search for his kidnapped wife goes nowhere, and it gives DeHaan little to do other than scream and become increasingly unhinged over a romance that American Primeval did nothing to develop in the first place. That fact only makes DeHaan’s performance seem all the more distractingly outsized and anchor-less.

Even greater problems arise in Abish’s scenes. The character is taken in early by Red Feather, and it isn’t long before she finds herself drawn to his Shoshone culture. The problematic, clichéd nature of this storyline might be forgivable were it not for later scenes in which Abish condescendingly explains the cost of war to Red Feather, a Native American man who has seen far more death than her, and then dictates the direction of American Primeval‘s entire Shoshone storyline with a handful of speeches that turn out to be more impactful than they logically should. To be fair to Lightfoot-Leon, she isn’t given much to work with. Her stiff, unconvincing performance nonetheless makes Abish’s one-note characterization all the more obvious. That, in turn, makes it hard to find any dramatic satisfaction in watching all the many, countless deaths that accrue in the name of protecting her. The character’s storyline is a profound misstep and one that, in combination with Isaac’s past as a white man raised by the Shoshone, makes American Primeval‘s attempt to partly tell a story of tragic Native American loss through a predominantly white perspective seem all the more regrettable and ill-considered.

American Primeval‘s biggest flaws are, for the most part, absent in its first two episodes, which impress with their Western sprawl and their commitment to a kind of propulsive, action-packed style of storytelling that is still rare on television. Aside from their over-reliance on CGI blood and gore, the series’ action sequences remain consistently gripping and kinetic throughout its six hours as well. American Primeval begins to seriously falter in its third installment, though, which sees the series’ desire to be as brutal and punishing as possible lead it down a nightmarish detour involving Gilpin’s Sara that feels gratuitous and unjustified in the moment and even more so the longer American Primeval goes on.

It is a series in which the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making it are frequently apparent onscreen. But the clear difficulty of its production isn’t enough to stop American Primeval‘s flaws from overwhelming it, nor are the committed performances of several of its cast members or the technical craftsmanship of its direction. It’s a Western that, despite its contemporary Prestige TV look and budget, feels in its ideas, countless clichés, and perspective dated by 20 or 30 years, at least.

American Primeval is streaming now on Netflix.