Not that that these two men are always so forthright with each other: More than once, people allude to some unnamed “debt” Seamus owes to Randolph McCluskey, as if the filmmakers felt they needed another layer to Seamus’ motivation for keeping his other cheek turned. It does, however, get increasingly didactic. The argument never gets more complex than that. Man of God Seamus espouses turning the other cheek. Man of action Wade wants to take the fight to the McCluskeys. #Echo of war how toAs the McCluskeys continue raiding the traps, Wade and Seamus rather tediously debate how to handle the problem. Let’s just say that no matter how problematic the Rileys become, there’s never any doubt whom we’re rooting for.īut the Rileys do make it hard sometimes. Despite some lip service paid to their wartime hardships, they remain stock western villains, led by a stereotypically brutal, implacable, utterly amoral Randolph (William Forsythe). Which might not have been such a problem if the McCluskeys had even as much character dimension as the Rileys. But for every moment that feels organic, there are at least a couple that feel mathematically calibrated. There’s something satisfyingly elemental about the economics of this conflict. #Echo of war fullBut their struggle is compounded by regular raids of the full traps by the neighboring McCluskey family–once-prosperous cattle ranchers who hit hard times after the Confederate army appropriated all their livestock. It’s bad enough that the Rileys are barely getting by in a pre-Reconstruction South by trapping furry animals whose meat they eat and whose pelts they sell. Lots of room for conflict there–but the film doesn’t do much with that before moving on to the real conflict, from an outside threat that ultimately tears this family apart. Seamus is the stalwart voice of an unyielding God, Abby is the restless, questioning daughter sneaking off for forbidden trysts with the wrong boy, and Samuel is the uncle-worshipping naïf who only sees the romantic side of war. And this is all too consistent with the way each of the film’s characters strictly adheres to the plot-dictated roles assigned to them. As in, just what happened to Wade’s late sister? Who was Wade before he became a PTSD Civil War survivor? And what was Seamus before he was the stern, taciturn, Bible-quoting patriarch we see here?Īctually, it’s easy to imagine that Seamus was always that, because that’s all he is throughout the course of this film. In the interim, this film, which takes its time getting going and never really changes that pace, pokes around the dynamics of a family that has more secrets than the filmmakers ever divulge. It’s an initially happy reunion, although right from the outset there is a tense undercurrent between Wade and Seamus. We soon learn that this lone rider is the film’s protagonist, Wade (James Badge Dale), a mentally battle-scarred ex-Confederate soldier, straggling home to Texas for a reunion with his late sister’s family: brother-in-law Seamus Riley (Ethan Embry), teenage niece Abby ( Maika Monroe) and younger teenage nephew Samuel (Owen Teague). You don’t have to be a genre scholar to recognize yet another solitary man, always moving on, not so much going somewhere as leaving somewhere else. Like many westerns before it, this one opens with a lone rider, crossing plains and fording streams. One can commend it for honorable intentions, evocative cinematography and some thoughtful performances in unrewarding roles. But that would grossly misrepresent what’s to be found in this largely failed attempt. Technically, you could describe Echoes of War as a classically minded new western with thematic ties to actual classics such as The Searchers and Shane, and a real feel for genuine tragedy.
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