A good, old-fashioned Western tends to be about a lot more than just a cowboy’s adventures on the wild frontier. The best of the genre speaks to elemental qualities that resonate on the same level as ancient fairy tales: the danger of the unknown and the redemptive power of self-reliance. Writer and director Wyatt Rockefeller nails these dimensions of classic Westerns in his feature film debut, Settlers, but he misses the mark with another essential ingredient of compelling storytelling: character development. What makes this film nearly overcome its shortcomings is the uniqueness of the scenario and the setting. This story of rugged pioneers on the fringes of human civilization takes place not in the hardscrabble American West but on the desert wastelands of Mars at some unspecified time in the future.
Divided into three chapters named for the principal characters, Settlers challenges viewers to piece together an understanding of the setting and the circumstances without explanation. A father (Jonny Lee Miller) asks his young daughter (Brooklynn Prince) to identify the stars visible outside their window, and our first clue arrives as she poignantly identifies Earth and the Moon. They’re not wearing spacesuits, even when they go outside to work in the dusty landscape surrounding their pre-fab trailer home on what looks like an isolated ranch, but the explanation for the apparent discrepancy takes times to unfold. The lack of spoon-feeding exposition contributes to the slow-burn tension of the film’s first half, in which we begin to appreciate the family’s vulnerability not only to the elements but to an unseen menace that lurks in the rocky hills.
When that menace appears, in the form of Jerry (Ismael Cruz Cordova), a heavily-armed claimant to the family’s homestead, the family dynamic is thrown into disarray. Unfortunately, so is the film’s narrative drive. Pivoting to a character-based drama reveals the shortcomings of Rockefeller’s script. Sofia Boutella, arguably the film’s biggest star, is left without much to work with in the role of Ilsa, the wife and mother. We get a glimpse of her playing guitar and singing, and a few scenes of motherly tenderness, but there’s no hint of complexity or calculation, which renders her actions later in the film puzzling and inconsistent.
The one character who really grounds the film is Remmy, played as an adolescent by Nell Tiger Free and as a young girl by Brooklynn Prince, who earned justified fame as a six-year-old in The Florida Project. Both actresses bring a sense of vulnerability and volatility to the role of a bright and resourceful survivor. Exploring her surroundings early in the film, Remmy discovers the edge of her habitable world: the transparent dome that covers the landscape and provides breathable atmosphere. She also discovers an underground tunnel that leads to the unpressurized and suffocating exterior of the Martian surface – an irresistible escape hatch from an untenable situation.
That we don’t know what exists beyond the dome is part of the film’s mystery, but it also points to the dearth of context that obscures the characters’ motivations. Among these human characters who sometimes behave in inexplicable ways is a wildcard whose intentions seem pure and noble: Steve, a robotic cargo crate on four wheels, playful and protective as an old dog. If the humans in the story are immigrants to Mars, Steve’s arc suggests that he might be the one with real staying power. His parting image on screen is profound and affecting, and calls into question the focus on the humans in this drama. Part of the allure of a Western lie in the defiance built into all the hardship as characters fight for their toehold in an inhospitable landscape. On Mars, it seems the humans will come and go, prone to follies of pride and lust and vengeance, but it’s the steady ones like Steve with the gumption to really call themselves settlers.
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