The New Trailer for Netflix’s Frontier is a Revenant-esque Showcase of Savagery

A few months ago, the studio Discovery Canada made the bold decision to renew Netflix’s forthcoming drama Frontier for a second season even before season one had aired. Now, following a teaser, a TV spot, and a couple of featurettes that dropped late last year, a new trailer has been released online, giving us a further glimpse into what the excitement at Discovery Canada was all about.

Set to a pounding, percussive score as images of wintry wilderness transport us back to the dangerous milieu of the 18th-century North American fur trade, the trailer has more than a few echoes of The Revenant. The key difference is, whereas the hero of Alejandro Iñárritu’s survival picture is one of the human traders, the protagonist of Frontier is closer to the bear that mauls him. Jason Momoa, playing a vigilante type named Declan Harp who disrupts the business of the profiteering tycoons behind the fur market, looks here to be nothing less than a force of nature, a beast of the northern wild who seems as ready to disembowel ill-fated extras as Khal Drogo was in Game of Thrones.

But as the trailer suggests, Declan is not the sole purveyor of barbarity in this savage world; alongside shots of Momoa’s character in brutal action, we see footage of both a sinister-looking redcoat menacing women and toupeed tyrants delivering ruthless orders from behind the scenes.

Whether or not Frontier lives up to its hype remains to be seen. What can be said for certain, however, is that the hype is real, with Discovery Canada VP Kevin MacDonald’s description of a “uniquely immersive [fictional] world … that [begs] for expansion” ringing true from the footage of the film we’ve seen thus far.

Frontier’s six-episode first season is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on Jan. 20. Watch the show’s new trailer above.