Ghost of Zebrina

A cowboy refers to the "silent pictures". The year is 1923 and "talkies" were still several years down the road. So movies were not yet referred to as silent pictures because that was all there was. It's like someone in 1955 said they were watching a "black and white TV". Color TVs were not around yet, so a TV was just a TV and we didn't refer to it as being black and white.

This is just personal.... but the Alexandra character really annoys me. Don't know if its the character or the actress playing the part.

In fact, on the whole, this prequel to Yellowstone has a much less likeable set of characters than the really good series I just watched, "1883". Helen Mirren is the exception. And I really don't get the business of having a dead person narrating the story.

Taylor Sheridan is a master of presenting serious and sweeping themes in epic fashion, but grounded in the stories of strong characters. Those epic movies that proliferated in the 1960s, ranging from "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Spartacus" to "The Fall of the Roman Empire" were sometimes overwhelmed by the "great man" view of telling history, but "1923" remains grounded.

With its slow pace and majestic landscapes, this feature-length segment eschews action despite its genre. Overall is a sense of dread, and I quickly sensed the cliffhanger climax to Spencer's sea adventure was coming, and when it occurred it still was thrilling. The amazing performances of stars Mirren and Ford are both subtle and moving, while the key Native American subplot was quite skillfully directed and powerful enough to keep pace with the central stories of the Duttons. And robber baron Timothy Dalton representing "progress" and the future was cleverly conceived by Taylor to be both inevitable and horrible.

The whole tug storyline, the captain that dies, Spencer can't wait three weeks to get a normal boat so he & Alex end up on a tug to go thousands on miles around the Horn of Africa into the Red Sea, but end up getting run over by a unpowered drifting ghost ship, capsize the tug, etc, is quite honestly ludicrous. It's so ludicrous it's hard to even imagine somebody actually thought this up and wrote it down.

To top that Alex is a preposterous character, galactic scale over confidence, selfish and arrogant, huge pain in the butt..... so smart until she was chased by Lions up a tree then she turns into a screaming, wobbling jelly, like a 1950's scream queen..... really.... Spencer would have done well to let the lions and hyenas eat her.

Really enjoyed Yellowstone though as a series, and found the other prequel 1883 reasonably good, but this version is really starting to irritate me.

What is a strong multi series plot with tons of potential opportunities to make a decent storyline out of it, has descended into the Spencer & Alex love story, which is to be honest pretty boring. Endless, mind numbing, pointless cheeky waffle between the two of them just irritates the heck out of me, and probably many others. What are we supposed to get out of this behind two larger than life people meet, like each, fall in love, then she goes away with him, ditching her fiancé like he's cold dog food in the process, yeah, she's a piece of work alright and he's even more stupid to go along with her, she'll dump him the minute she funds someone better. Not unlike the Elsa character in 1883, too much in total.

Not sure about this version of the saga, it could have been done a lot better.

Great acting by Helen Mirren, Harrison Ford and others though, but rest of the cast / characters is meh mediocre at best.....or just plain bad like Alex!