Some things are best left imagined, no?
The real reason this was made at all and secured such a broad canvas (4 hours) is that we were eager to revisit these people, Gus and Woodrow from Lonesome Dove.
The story is that they join up with a hopeless filibustering expedition to annex Santa Fe, the film mirrors the exhaustion, aimlessness, dashed dreams on no man's land. The tone is darker—there is scalping, torture, lepers. Young Gus and Woodrow are narrowly reduced to caricature, which is bound to disappoint, but they are mostly side-characters on the journey.
But Lonesome didn't just have the endless expanses of sky and prairie, the riding and shooting. Embedded in that was a richer journey of memory and dying, a whole mess of life already folded in and centered on the vision of women. What's more, it was the true article of myth, the eulogy a mid-19th century woman like Clara would seek in a Whitman poem.
Here, we just drag our feet through the desert and the women (the same women) are tacked on in the beginning and end.
