This article contains minor spoilers, so please read with caution.
This year, in addition to the acclaimed and well-received "Mission Impossible 6" produced by Paramount, it also gave the audience a great surprise on the small screen, and the new drama "Yellowstone" produced by Paramount Television Network is undoubtedly the most eye-catching work in this year's new American drama.
Leaving aside the show's protagonist, the already famous Kevin Costner, and Tyler Sheridan, one of the directors and writers of Yellowstone, is also a rising "rising star" in the film industry in recent years, although the latter has been working in Hollywood for more than two decades. Sheridan is undoubtedly known for his films "Border Killer" and "To the Soup", the former won the Best Original Screenplay of the American Writers Guild that year, and "To the Soup" was nominated for the 89th Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Last year, he transformed into a director, bringing his self-written and directed "Hunting Wind River Valley", these three of his personal screenwriting works are also called the "Border Trilogy" by fans, most of the stories of the film focus on the Border Region of the United States, behind the tough folk customs, there is another world far away from the conventional secular society, in which the complexity and struggle of human nature is fascinating. As a writer and director with a fairly strong personal style and western plot, it is a match made in heaven for Yellowstone to be directed by him.
Similar to many American dramas, the first episode of "Yellowstone" lasted more than an hour, or even reached an hour and a half, but Sheridan did not waste this time at all, almost properly laying out the relevant characters who will appear later, while carefully showing some subtle relationships between the characters.
The story line of the series is not complicated, Kevin Costner plays John Dutton, the head of the Dutton family in Montana, sitting on the largest ranch in the area, adjacent to the ranch is the famous Yellowstone Park, Indian reservations and land developers to buy the land in urgent need of development, in a dispute caused by a livestock mistakenly entered the Indian reservation, the Dutton family suffered unexpected casualties, such a multi-party dispute and family crisis slowly unfolded in this wild western world.
However, from the first episode alone, the show brings people a very rich space for association, starring Kevin Costner is one of them, 27 years ago with "Dance with Wolves" won seven Oscars, in that year's film played a hero who identified with Indian tribes to help him fight against white invasion, and in "Yellowstone" he became a white farmer who confronted Indians. For fans familiar with "Dances with Wolves" and Costner, this sense of dislocation between identity and situation is also a major attraction of this show, and Costner's acting skills in it are also quite explosive.
The second is derived from director Sheridan's last film, "Wind Valley hunting", which is also a film related to the racial contradictions between the land, whites and Indians, and the impact of the history of the Founding of the United States on the present is still a shadow over the Indians and other people around them. Even Kelsey Chow, who starred in "Wind Valley", has reappeared in "Yellowstone", and it is clear that for Sheridan, the film length of less than two hours last year can not fully realize his expression, which can be seen as a spin-off of "Wind Valley", and surely more than one season of "Yellowstone" is also the best way to expand its "Border Universe".
Sheridan's screenwriting skills are clearly superior to his directing techniques, which also includes his grasp of the rhythm of the play required for different presentations. As the rhythm of the series "Yellowstone" is relatively slow, but for now, the first eight episodes have a strong dramatic conflict in each episode, especially the first episode let the eldest son of the Dutton family be killed in the melee, and it naturally takes a little courage to lay the groundwork for a larger conflict by directly sacrificing the original few characters. At the same time, the few flashbacks interspersed in each episode also constantly enrich each character, such as why Beth, as the only woman in the family, has such a strong and strong self-destructive tendency, and the past of each character in the play is almost explained through those intermittent flashback clips.
Of course, the most important thing is the struggle of the different forces represented by the characters in the play, in order to protect the land handed down for a hundred years, the farmer can be said to be unscrupulous, openly backed by political forces and laws, secretly killing people and setting fires. The leaders of the Indian tribes wanted to reclaim the land that once belonged to their ancestors, and were even willing to cooperate with the real estate merchants who wanted to rely on these lands to make money against the Dutton family. At the same time, the drama of "House of Cards" is also full of this series, politicians have their own small calculations, and balancing local forces is never for the sake of long-term peace and stability, but to be able to use them as their own pawns to get votes.
Therefore, it is also about the West, compared to last year's Netflix-produced "Godless" and HBO's hit drama "Westworld", compared to the former "Yellowstone" presented in the United States West is more modern but still conservative, but unlike the latter is just wearing the cloak of the West to tell a science fiction concept, the Western scenery and cowboys live in "Yellowstone" is everything, as for those disputes are a gust of sand in this vast land.
Recommendation index: Very recommended, should spend a limited life on good content, rather than a series of palace fight dramas.