‘American Primeval’ review: Can Netflix’s grimy Western mini-series greatest ‘Yellowstone’?

American Primeval is decently entertaining as an action-drama, though it’s quite fascinating in concept. The Netflix mini-series, created by Mark L. Smith and directed by Peter Berg, features an accomplished ensemble playing mostly familiar archetypes during a pre-Civil War struggle for the American West. However, it saps anything resembling wistfulness from its Hollywood Western roots, complicating its chances of cornering the post-Yellowstone market (alongside the latter’s many spin–offs). What’s left is the husk of a beloved genre, told in stark, chaotic hues seldom seen on-screen.  

The show’s numerous subplots are connected by grisly happenstance, albeit not much else. It’s a violent saga, even though its violence quickly plateaus. This goes for both its physical brutality, as well as the many cruel ideologies in its crosshairs, from white supremacy and religious fundamentalism to a general penchant for war. But that these are so nakedly on display, in a show this unapologetically grim, is a welcome surprise, from a setting and storytelling mode so otherwise steeped in nostalgia. Despite its threads unraveling in haphazard ways, the series is never boring, and never wanting for a good performance.

What is American Primeval about?

Credit: Courtesy of Netflix © 2024

The story of American Primeval, which takes place in the winter of 1857, is based on real locations and events, albeit with necessary dramatizations. With a bounty on her head for an alleged murder, well-to-do mother Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin) absconds from Philadelphia with her pre-teen son Devin (Preston Mota) to meet up with her husband out west. But upon arriving at Fort Bridger — a real fur trading outpost in Wyoming along the Oregon Trail — she learns that her guide has already left, leading her to desperately search for safe passage wherever she can find it.

The fort is not far from volatile conflicts between numerous factions. The Shoshone Tribe is one of several who have been driven from their native land by constant war. A ruthless Mormon militia patrols the territories near Utah, at the behest of the expansionist, extremist preacher Governor Brigham Young (a terrifying Kim Coates). Meanwhile, the conscientious U.S. Army Captain Edmund Dellinger (Lucas Neff) tries to keep the peace, but he’s growing increasingly cynical about the possibility of coexistence (as we’re frequently reminded, through his numerous diary entries narrated in voiceover).

The aforementioned groups only account for about half the series’ characters, all of whom are set up bit-by-bit through very direct exposition. Additionally, there’s the lone gunman from whom Sara seeks help, the lonely and brooding Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), who shares an intimate history with the Shoshone. There are the bounty hunters on her trail, led by Virgil Cutter (Jai Courtney), a leader whose heartlessness clashes with his more empathetic protégé Lucas (Andrew P. Logan).

There are the various militiamen and Mormon leaders, and there are also Mormon civilians just trying to find their way unscathed. Some of the latter end up inadvertently attacked when traveling with a larger caravan, including newlywed Abish Pratt (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) and her husband Jacob (Dane DeHaan), whose increasingly bloody and disheveled appearance each episode is as ludicrously funny as Homer Simpson hitting infinite rocks and tree branches. And of course, there’s Jim Bridger himself, the founder of the aforementioned fort, played with smarm and panache by the ever-delightful Shea Whigham.

The show also features a number of Native characters who, although they’re seldom allowed to leave the strict confines of plot function — American Primeval is an anti-Western in every way but this — still displays a beating humanity and ethos. There’s the young, nonverbal Shoshone girl Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), a runaway who hitches a ride with Sara and Devin, and there’s also rogue Shoshone warrior Red Feather (Derek Hinkey), who forms his own tribe intent on trading blood for blood. If the latter sounds a whole lot like a central character in Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, his appearance isn’t the only time you’ll be making that comparison.

If anything, the show plays like a morbid and cynical answer to Horizon, the film series that Costner left Yellowstone in order to make, and one that wrestles with the violence inherent to America’s founding myths while still morosely holding on to a folkloric image of the nation’s past. American Primeval has less trouble removing its rose-tinted glasses, even going as far as to deploy rearrangements of Woody Guthrie’s famous folk song “This Land Is Your Land” to deeply ironic effect. However, it struggles just as much as Costner’s film when it comes to switching between its numerous characters.

American Primeval is propulsive, but uneven.

Credit: Matt Kennedy / Netflix

The show’s structure and plot might mirror Costner’s Western epic, but its closest aesthetic cousins are actually Alejandro González Iñárritu’s own violent winter Western The Revenant (which Mark L. Smith also notably penned) and, in terms of frenetic editing, the Star Wars films of J.J. Abrams. That second comparison is, for the most part, complimentary. American Primeval charges forth with reckless abandon, leaving little room to consider the actual time and space between people spread across different parts of the landscape. That’s not always a good thing, but it means each new plot development is always just around the corner, with characters always ready to stumble into each other’s stories.

On the other hand, the lack of actual travel time or any sort of downtime for the characters, even across six hours, leaves little room for them to unravel and develop. Gilpin and Kitsch, for instance, are suitably austere, resulting in Jane Austen-esque romantic tensions, but who they are as people is established from minute one, and remains frozen in stasis throughout the story. The same is true for most characters except DeHaan’s, who has the advantage of being changed by physical injury. No one is really affected or impacted, in human ways, by the show’s many goings-on.

That said, those goings on are usually fun to watch, from gritty firefights in unbroken takes to vicious hand-to-hand combat in close quarters. Emmanuel Lubezki’s Oscar–winning cinematography for The Revenant was clearly the prototype here, with short-lensed close-ups skewing space and enhancing the impact of everything from blood to spittle, all covered in snow. The first episode is wonderfully chaotic, with its quick cuts and askew Dutch angles throwing everything off-balance as civilians are engulfed by attacks. Unfortunately, this visual approach ends up somewhat indiscriminate across the series, even during mundane conversations.

The show’s washed-out palette and permeating muck and grime paint America’s infancy as a time of petty squabble without absolution — a counter-narrative to most of the country’s mythology about itself. However, the show also builds in a kind of narrative backstop to prevent it from falling into total despair: the American dream is still, in a sense, alive, but it’s relegated to the four walls of Fort Bridger.

The focused metaphors in American Primeval almost work.

Credit: Matt Kennedy / Netflix

The fort, which appears early on in the series and becomes a frequent respite from the action, very much exists in the vein of cinema’s lawless Old West, with its saloons, and shootings, and hangings. But it’s also representative of an American ideal. It’s the only place in the show where characters from all walks of life, and all backgrounds (white, Native, or otherwise) can congregate, take refuge from religious extremism, and have an actual shot at living.

It’s also the center of a beautifully haunting climax that revels in the slow demise of said ideals, which makes for a pitch-perfect conclusion to the show — or would have, had the series chosen to end on this symbolic note. Instead, it returns to one of its many ongoing narratives so that Person A can wander into Story B and conclude Subplot C, most of which jog in place for multiple episodes.

While American Primeval occasionally wields its metaphors with skill, it is, for the most part, a banal and obvious show about the trickle-down effects of the past. For instance, Courtney’s Cutter, when addressing Sara, all but turns to the camera in order to deliver the line, “Our current circumstances are a reflection of our past decisions.” The problem with this sort of delivery — other than its thuddingly literal nature — is that this theme and every other one is established in the first episode and never transforms dramatically.

American Primeval may be forward-thinking in its premise, with its apparent deconstruction of national history and self-image. However, its execution ends up with little to say, beyond the broad strokes of people’s selfishness causing pain and suffering. You learn this from the get-go, so you know exactly the kind of show you’re getting into from there on out, but there’s little left to learn. So, even its subversions of traditional Hollywood imagery and American mythmaking feel oddly familiar and comfortable by the end.

American Primeval is now streaming on Netflix.