Dances with Wolves

Matt Singer2.5

Dances With Wolves? More like slow dances with wolves, amirite?All right guys, that’s my time! You’ve been a terrific crowd, be sure to tip your waitress and get home safe.

Kevin Pitman5.0

Wow, this does NOT feel like a 3 hour movie. It seriously feels like 2 hours, max. The pacing is "slow", but it needs to be, as it pulls us into the landscape, the situations, and the characters before raising the tension. This is a movie that is an experience - it stays with you days later and it makes you think what could have been if we had done things differently when we settled North America. When we finally meet the rest of the American military troop, we are given a look at a people who haven't changed much in the last 150 years. People always joke about how Britain sent their criminals to Australia, but North America wasn't much different. The people who had the least in the Old World were sent over to settle the new world, and these low-class mentalities were let loose on a land they had labeled as "free for the taking". Part of me wonders which would be worse - convicted felons or men who were slippery enough to avoid conviction. The soldiers are depicted as a rough group, but it is a couple disgusting members who make your blood run cold. I know it's a movie, but I can imagine the Wild West was full of men like this. Costner and McDonnell are excellent here, but the real heart of the movie lives in the tribe and the village. We come to love these characters as our initial fear of their warriors is shown to be double sided - fear causing both sides to attack each other before attempting diplomacy or even communication. There are two very disturbing and emotionally crippling scenes in this, and the worst part is, you get a sense that some of these horrific things were inevitable from the start. We know the outcome of the Native tribes and ways of life, and the movie handles this in a very bittersweet way at the end. I couldn't ask for a better ending for this story, as it sums up the entire history of our clashing cultures.I really, really want to see this again.

Will Sloan

Oppressively, exhaustingly well-made. Not a bad movie, exactly, but there are many bad movies I like more. If every shot is beautiful, is no shot beautiful? It's a good bet that Costner's favourite art movement is the Hudson River School. I spent a lot of this movie's runtime trying to figure out why the stunning landscapes in this movie weren't working on me the same way that the ones in Lawrence of Arabia did, and I think it's because there's not enough emotional/textural variation in them. In Lawrence, some of those desert vistas are meant to communicate how fucking hot it is out there.It's tradition for any historically oppressed/marginalized group that their stories will be told for years on the margins - in outsider/folk art; in B- and underground movies; in art produced and distributed mostly within the communities - until finally being acknowledged in a Groundbreaking, Landmark mainstream product that is mostly a vanity project for the wavy-haired Hollywood star du jour. Obviously this movie has a lot of good intentions, was a good showcase for a lot of talented Indigenous actors, has a positive message, was an earnest attempt by Hollywood to atone for the sins of the past, etc etc etc, but the fact that Costner's love interest is a white woman who was raised in the tribe says everything you need to know about its political and artistic limitations. Overall I found this movie staggeringly boring, but no judgment from me if you like it. It was built to be liked.