This week, I received a film from Netflix that I had expected to see in the theater last year.

I had seen trailers for the film last spring, and earmarked it in my mind as a must see when it came out on the big screen, if, for anything, for its extensive use of New Mexico for filming locations. It came and went to theaters, and I somehow missed it.

So, this week, Netflix let me catch up with it, and I am glad I could.

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The film, “Hostiles”, centers on the story of a Union officer, calvary Captain Joe Blocker, who has spent his career as a military man in the wild west- essentially a lifetime mired fighting in the Indian Wars. The year is 1892, and Blocker is at the end of his career, in mid life, stationed at an old Army outpost in nowhere New Mexico, where his unit has spent umpteen years striving to round up (or remove) Apaches who have been a blight on the territory. Blocker’s hardness as a soldier is clear when he is given a final mission by his unit commander.

He is charged with taking a dying Cheyenne elder being held captive at Fort Berringer from New Mexico back to the land of his people in Montana, where he can pass in the place of his people. The charter for the mission came down from President Harrison himself, as a bit of conciliatory public relations in reaction to growing unrest about the treatment of Natives in the West. Blocker, sitting in the middle of hell and the haranguing heathens, fumes at the job he is given.

The prisoner he is supposed to accompany is a war chief who, in a battle in earlier days, was responsible for the death of three of Blocker’s men- and friends.

Blocker rejects the job until threatened with court martial and the loss of his pension. Then, with reluctance, he sets out with a small detail of soldiers and the chief and his small family, for the Valley of the Bears.

The film accomplishes what a good story is supposed to- it is a tale of character transformation.

Blocker, played by Christian Bale, begins the journey as a man full of unemotional hatred for the Native, who has reaped death and destruction on European settlements in the West for centuries. It takes making this journey yoked to a particular Indian- a man of a particular people- for him to realize that among the many Native nations, just like among the many European people, there are men, and there are groups, who desire war, and there are men and groups who desire peace.

Blocker, and his Native counterpart, chief Yellow Hawk, are each transformed as their long journey tests each man’s definitions of friend and foe.

They complete the long trek, and the film ends with some dramatic twists, but the character arcs resolve well. The main character and his counterpart each change.

The film is raw and hard, like the Southwestern sunlight over the film’s natural sets.

Writer/director Scott Cooper aimed for honesty in telling this fictional tale, trying to make it as real as possible to that day, by building forts of materials and designs present in the day, and utilizing Cheyenne, Comanche and Apache consultants during filming to make Native interests and actions authentic. He also pored over history accounts to make sure that the attitudes and animosities in the film were also correct- which, based on my reading about the Indian Wars in the West, he illustrated well.

Stirred after watching the film a first time on Thursday night, I told my dad about it, and I ended up watching it again with him last night. And it was as good or better the second time around. I saw new things in the story I had missed the first time around. The story development and resolution remained just as tense and satisfying as in the first go around.

And both times after watching the film, I thought about my Anza project.

“This story is very much like what my story wants to be.”

They are cousins, these projects, separated by 120 years. Replace the US Army with a Spanish contingent, and you don’t really have to alter the location or the adversaries. The other main players remain the same- the Comanche, the Apache, the Kiowa. The reasons for conflict are also largely no different- the fights are still for land, for resources, and for dominion- the ongoing tale of peoples in the harsh Southwest.

And in the middle of it all, single men act while trying to make sense of obligations to country, family, and their culture of origin- and the pulls of human moral universals.

“Hostiles” at least points me in the direction of how to do such a project, at least.

At base, at the heart of this story, a hard and hardened man can change.