Utterly violent, AMERICAN PRIMEVAL was a lot of fun to watch, though its relentless point about the savagery of the Old West becomes numbing at the end.
The series is about a group of people who find themselves at or near a lonely outpost serving traders and travelers in the Utah region, who find themselves entangled after a massacre based on the historical Mountain Meadows Massacre that occurred in 1857 during the Utah War. The result is a bloody clash of cultures between the U.S. government, the Mormon militia, and the local Shoshone tribe.
I would have loved to have had a seat in this pitch meeting. I can picture the writer pitching it as “BLOOD MERIDIAN with romance.”
The story mostly focuses on a woman traveling with her son, who must cross the mountains to find her husband. Fortunately, she falls in with a wagon train heading west to California. Unfortunately, she’s on the run from bounty hunters, and the wagon train is doomed. Enter a brooding loner who might just be able to get her across the savage wilderness. She teaches him to care about people again, while he teaches her that to survive, she will have to shed many of her civilized morals and become hard.
The scenery is of course gorgeous, the world building offering an authentic feel. The savagery feels on point for what is known about the Wild West and in particular this region during hysteria about persecution among the Mormons, which had established an armed theocracy under Brigham Young, as well as the Shoshone who are steadily getting squeezed out of their lands. The characters feel larger than life, and the dialogue and pacing are good. For those who like action, there is a body count that would make even Quentin Tarantino blush. The casting is great, the acting solid.
On the downside, it’s hard to say what the point of it all is other than, yeah, one had to be hard to survive the Wild West. The story is largely a tragedy, though it’s difficult to discern what if anything the filmmakers were trying to say other than showing a lot of people being bastards and killing each other in the Old West would be cool to watch.
Overall, I didn’t expect much and had fun with AMERICAN PRIMEVAL. It’s bloody and over the top, and if that doesn’t bother you, it’s quite a bit of fun.
Leave a Reply