Hidalgo (2004)

Hidalgo arrives from 2004, a year when a studio could still spend one hundred million dollars on a horse picture and call the result an epic. Joe Johnston directs Viggo Mortensen as Frank Hopkins, a Pony Express rider who carries a Lakota mother, a government paycheck, and a mustang named Hidalgo into a three thousand mile race across the Najd. The film offers sandstorms, locusts, sword fights, and Omar Sharif observing Buffalo Bill's Wild West show with the patience of a man who has watched empires come and go. It also claims, in its marketing, to be true. Historians have spent two decades suggesting otherwise. The film does not much care.

The cultural furniture here proves more interesting than the plot mechanics. Hopkins' Lakota heritage and his guilt over Wounded Knee give the story a spine, and the production hired Lakota consultants for the ceremonial scenes. The Arabian court is populated with actual Middle Eastern performers, which in 2004 counted as a minor miracle. Jazira, the sheikh's daughter, resists becoming a fifth wife, discards the veil, and instructs the hero on desert survival, though the film keeps her in the supporting role where adventure pictures of that era parked their women. She satisfies every romantic obligation the genre demands and not a duty more.

Absent entirely are the other markers of contemporary virtue. No queer characters, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent arc. The nearest thing to a social program is Hopkins buying the government's mustangs and setting them loose, a gesture of animal husbandry that doubles as a mild conservation note. Lady Davenport's bribery earns a few swipes at aristocracy. The film lectures only when it forgets it is having fun, which is rare. It is a relic, and a reasonably charming one.