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American Primeval Is Three Westerns in One
One of them is gripping and good, one of them is fine, and one of them is basically The Revenant.
This six-episode Netflix miniseries set in the “wild and untamed” Utah Territory of 1857 is instead focused on the fervent Mormons led at the time by Brigham Young (Kim Coates) and suggests their violent attempts to drive non-Mormon settlers and Native tribes out of what they considered their “Zion” established a brutality that seeped into both the land and the American identity. A fair amount of this is grounded in the historical record, as described by Jon Krakauer in his nonfiction book Under the Banner of Heaven, and American Primeval has absolutely zero sympathy toward any of these characters, whom it depicts as backstabbers, murderers, and scoundrels — and if you somehow miss that, an audacious and gruesome public-whipping sequence late in the miniseries makes its perspective plain. Dane DeHaan gives good crazy eyes as Jacob Pratt, who is nearly scalped by fellow members of his faith during the Mountain Meadows Massacre and then unknowingly joins his attackers to find his missing wife Abish, who has been taken in by Wolf Clan leader Red Feather (Derek Hinkey).
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