<em>Hostiles</em> Is a Brutal, Shallow Western
Scott Cooper’s new film sees Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and Wes Studi battling through the American West in the 1890s.
The first two scenes of , Scott Cooper’s harsh and uncompromising western, depict a familiar cycle of cruelty. In the first, a white family living deep in New Mexico Territory are attacked by a Comanche war party, with only the mother, Rosalie (Rosamund Pike), surviving. In the second, the hard-faced Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) rounds up an Apache family and drags them to an American fort, where other Native Americans have been imprisoned for years without trial. Both sequences are
