It's not the 'West' at it's best
From: The New York Daily News, 6/10/2005
The new 12-hour miniseries "Into the West" boasts Steven Spielberg as one of its executive producers and such a wide canvas that its story covers 65 years and an entire continent.
From both the Native American and pioneer perspectives, "Into the West" tells the story of national expansion - not only how the West was won, but, from the other viewpoint, how it was lost.
With the Spielberg name and so many hours to tell such a compelling saga, the six-part "Into the West" (part one premieres tonight at 8 on TNT; remaining installments run on subsequent Fridays) promises so much.
Only the first half of the miniseries was available for preview - not enough to assess the full impact of the drama, but enough to suggest that its promise isn't entirely fulfilled.
The gold standard for the televised Western, a genre that reached maturity with "Gunsmoke" 50 years ago and largely faded from TV a decade after that, is represented by the 1989 CBS miniseries "Lonesome Dove" and the current HBO series "Deadwood."
"Into the West," while covering the same years and some of the same regions and stories as those Westerns, isn't in that same league.
It's closer, in terms of its uneven quality as well as its multigenerational story structure, to such miniseries as "Centennial" and "How the West Was Won."
"Into the West" is better than either of those in its accuracy of detail - costumes, languages, etc. - and its sympathy for and understanding of native cultures. Where it's no better, for the most part, is in shaping characters, rather than skipping from historical event to event.
Like so many of these sprawling sagas, "Into the West" focuses on the clash between two ultimately warring perspectives. "Into the West" tells of a wheel-making clan called the Wheelers and a Lakota Indian clan.
Jacob Wheeler (Matthew Settle) is the primary hero on one side of "Into the West"; on the other, it's Loved by the Buffalo (a role shared by Simon R. Baker and George Leach), and straddling the two worlds is Thunder Heart Woman (Tonantzin Carmelo).
The name actors show up throughout, appearing and disappearing in tag-team fashion: Beau Bridges leads the wagon train, Gary Busey plays a wild-eyed, wild-haired mountain man, and Keri Russell plays a feisty pioneer woman.
The action, like the acting, is good in some spots, jerky and overstated in others. Even before the poles are strung across the prairie, everything in "Into the West" is telegraphed. The biggest surprise, and disappointment, is that, so far, it's not better than it is.