Terror on the Prairie is a gritty and grounded western. I might have eventually
been tempted to pay for this one to support it as a Gina Carano venture after
her unjust removal from Lucasfilm. Unlike the trailer, there is no musical score.
The film relies on sound effects and the inherent tension of each scene without tipping the scales to tell us how to feel. The trailer also gave the impression that the threat in the story might come from indigenous characters, which might be par for Daily Wire. But in the movie proper, we immediately see that the white villains are doing the scalping. The baddies are Confederates who resent losing the Civil War, and they are the ones making a show of praying and quoting the Bible. THAT is a pleasant surprise considering what might be expected from a Ben Shapiro production. Gina Carano is not playing Cara Dune from The Mandalorian here, but a regular grounded person who has who is not an expert marksman. The indigenous characters glimpsed in the trailer appear early on to recruit Gina's character to help stitch up an injured woman from their tribe. It is not clear just why they think a white woman will naturally know how to do the operation and why none of them can. But it works out and they give her a token gift in thanks that will come in handy later.
Oddly enough, Terror on the Prairie while an excellent movie is not ideologically different from typical Hollywood approaches to the Western genre. And that is a compliment.
The film relies on sound effects and the inherent tension of each scene without tipping the scales to tell us how to feel. The trailer also gave the impression that the threat in the story might come from indigenous characters, which might be par for Daily Wire. But in the movie proper, we immediately see that the white villains are doing the scalping. The baddies are Confederates who resent losing the Civil War, and they are the ones making a show of praying and quoting the Bible. THAT is a pleasant surprise considering what might be expected from a Ben Shapiro production. Gina Carano is not playing Cara Dune from The Mandalorian here, but a regular grounded person who has who is not an expert marksman. The indigenous characters glimpsed in the trailer appear early on to recruit Gina's character to help stitch up an injured woman from their tribe. It is not clear just why they think a white woman will naturally know how to do the operation and why none of them can. But it works out and they give her a token gift in thanks that will come in handy later.
Oddly enough, Terror on the Prairie while an excellent movie is not ideologically different from typical Hollywood approaches to the Western genre. And that is a compliment.