Dances With Wolves (1990) REVIEW

Back before we had proper CGI, back before a movie blockbuster needed only a scantily clad woman and a gung-ho message about a strident America kickin’ down doors an’ takin’ names to be rated by movie fans everywhere as ‘good’, we had films with plots. No, not all of them were good, this is no misty-eyed look to the past through rose-tinted spectacles to a supposed-but-never-was era of great films; one only has to look at Highlander II to see rot creeping up the flagpole of great cinema – but, some of them were good, and, Dances With Wolves is one of them that was.

***I should say at this moment, that although the peoples who were on the American continent before Europeans got there are now known as Native American peoples, back in 1990 (and in 1863 when the film was set), Native American peoples were referred to as Indians (for reasons of confused map making and navigation by European explorers). For that reason, I will refer to the Native American peoples in this film as Indians, as that is what they are called in the film.***

Much could be written about this film, and much already has – see WIKI for details on how culturally important the film was to become. A history lesson told through the (flawed) medium of fiction perhaps, and one that focuses on a white male to tell the story, this film nevertheless tried its best to show Native Americans as people and not curios. This review is just a short piece intended to get your appetite whetted, not a serious piece of writing intended to explore all of the themes and history that the film takes us through as we watch it. Be warned though, even at its cinematic length, the film stands as an epic three hour experience, which many directors aspire to be able to fill with engaging content, but often fail, which puts people off long films. Costner did not fail to fill this film with engaging content, however, and even though I have already seen the cinematic release several times, I would still sit down to watch the 236 minute director’s cut if I had it available.

 

Although the poster makes it look like a ’90s serial killer film, it IS a Western

 

The Setup
Dances With Wolves follows the story of our man Kevin Costner playing the sensitive soul of Lieutenant Dunbar of the US Army during the American Civil War. The year is 1863, and people are living in an era of mechanised killing, but doing without real medicine or compassion, the latter of which seems perhaps least important, but is actually the key note of the film. Beginning the film with a feat of suicidal bravery that rallies his own side to rise up and smite the entrenched Rebs, the wounded Dunbar is given his pick of posting by the top brass for his role in saving the day. He chooses to see the frontier out West before it’s gone, and, although it’s not what anybody expected him to choose, he is sent out, away from the meat grinder of the war to a little-visited frontier post called Fort Sedgwick. The fort is abandoned and has the look of a never-visited ex-training camp, but the good Lieutenant decides to stay on, in spite of the fact that he’s alone, miles from any other white people (which will become an issue later) and in unconquered, that is, ‘Indian’ territory.

Here is a link to a GREAT review on the film by another writer

Already we’ve had a lot to chew on in the opening sequences of the film, and we haven’t even met the people who the film centres on yet. Dunbar blanches at an officer’s dinner where bloody steaks are served to ravenous men – the blood too much for the traumatised Dunbar. Dunbar asks to see the frontier “before it’s gone”, a judgement in three words on Westward Expansionism, Manifest Destiny, the ‘Progress’ of immigrant America on the continent’s native peoples and the devastation of that progress on the ancient landscape. The officer who sends Dunbar to Fort Sedgwick shoots himself as Dunbar leaves in a depressing and perhaps ham-fisted episode of guilt and shame – foreshadowing what is to come later in the story. The West, the frontier, is an unspoiled vista with no violence to be seen; no Civil War, no mechanised killing, no medic tents looking like abbatoirs as men have limbs sawn off – the best available treatment that the wounded frontline soldier is offered. But all is not well in paradise. Dunbar’s driver (horse and buggy) is slain by rampant Pawnee Indians on his way back from delivering the Lieutenant, and so our man Costner is out in the country, alone. Before the film has really even gotten going then, we have seen clashes of ideologies and of technology versus the human body. We have seen tacit judgement passed on the movement of white immigrant populations across the American continent and all that such movement brought with it. We have seen the beginnings of the hinted at clash between white people and the Indians, and we are now ready to experience the story!

The trailer is a slice of pure cheese, but the film itself is much better

The story follows the slow-to-build friendship of Lieutenant Dunbar and the local Lakota Indians, led by Graham Greene playing Kicking Bird who, not knowing quite what to make of the lone US soldier, take him in after a fashion, tucking him into their lives. With shades of The Searchers (1956), we have Mary McDonnell playing a white woman living with the Indians since childhood called Stands With A Fist, but this film is not about the great white adventurer rescuing the fair maiden from not-white aggressors. This film is, at its core, more about seeing ‘the Indians’ as people, and not as savages, or road blocks in the path of Westward Expansionism.

Here is a link to another great and balanced review by a WordPresser – spoiler alert!!!

Epic not only in length and theme but also cinematically, Dances With Wolves shows us gorgeous scenery and amazing footage of a buffalo hunt as well as a glimpse at a sort of living that has mostly gone from the earth, but the window dressing, which is what all gorgeous sights are, never takes us away from the bubbling tension that not only maintains but builds throughout the film once it gets going (once we get to Fort Sedgwick). Like people waiting for the other shoe to drop, we are tortured, teased, hounded by the nagging doubts and fears of what will happen when the white world, when the US Army, catches up with Lieutenant Dunbar. Will he be able to affect a rapprochement between the native people he has been living amongst and the (then) blue uniformed footsoldiers of progress? It hardly seems likely, given the well-worn cinematic history of American Indians and the white people. Will there be another genocide once the boys in blue find Dunbar? Will they find him? Won’t they find him? We are literally tortured by these doubts from the moment it becomes clear that Dunbar has made a life with the Indians, and that they are decent people with a sense of fairness and community that by 1990 was almost never shown on cinema screens when Native Americans are considered. All of these questions I leave deliberately unanswered, because if you haven’t seen the film, you should watch it cold, without reading up about it first.

In order to leave you able to experience the film for yourself and, because of the incredibly dense and important subject matter, this is an incredibly difficult film to review in just a few short words. The themes that it covers are each on their own so complicated that one could write great essays of many thousands of words, drawing on sources from several libraries and still not really get at the heart of what is being said. The best that I can do for you is to flag the film up for those who haven’t seen it, tell you that you really should see it, and leave you without spoilers and without my pronouncements on what the film means. To put it bluntly, Dances With Wolves is an epic film that doesn’t receive quite the recognition these days that it ought, and for that reason I commend it to you wholeheartedly. It’s by no means perfect, and it is, as others have said, a product of its time, but then what isn’t? This review with its links could hardly have been written about the film when it came out, and a review written twenty four years from now will be different again. I give this film a three out of five, but that’s not to say that it’s in any way mediocre – just that, having been made when it was, it was unable to reach as far as it could perhaps reach now if it was made in this day and age. I hesitate to say it, but perhaps Mr Costner could be persuaded to do a remake?? In any case, watch the film but do keep in mind that it is just a film, and not an accurate portrayal of exactly how things were in 1860s America, more a picture of the threat to native peoples and lands posed by imperialist power, regardless of how wonderful and unworthy of such treatment those native peoples were.

Logan’s Run 1976 REVIEW

Just to be clear, I mean the Michael York film, not whatever abominable dross remake they’re apparently working on right now (see IMDB for the tragic details), LOGAN’S RUN is another of those films that if you haven’t seen, you need to get your thumb from up your sphincter and use it (after its been washed) to select Logan’s Run from whatever streaming service you prefer and watch it!

 Not a marathon to be run holding hands, the title will make sense in good time…

Starring Michael York as Logan, Jenny Agutter as Jessica and Richard Jordan (Jordan this time powerfully playing the antagonist Francis), Logan’s Run would not only be responsible for much of the background and feel of the later role playing game Paranoia, but it would also spawn a TV series and show us Jenny Agutter fully nude, which, at the time, was quite the thrill indeed! More on that later. For now, it’s the mid 1970s and another thinky sci-fi film has hit the screens…

I would have put a picture of Agutter all bare and naked here but Paranoia is far saucier!

The plot then, of Logan’s Run the movie (it was based on a novel of the same name) is that a vast, sprawling complex of impenetrable domed warehouses, like hothouse orchids, the last survivors of humanity. These people are genetically well-endowed, and reproduce via some sort of cloning process (the details of that in the film are sketchy, but it isn’t really about cloning as such, so that bit doesn’t really matter). Now, life in the city complex is pretty much one of hedonistic pursuit – there’s no disease, no war, no crime – everything is one great big house party. The people in there are the survivors of some event that wiped most of the rest of the world out, although none of them are old enough to remember it. A benificent, artificially intelligent computer runs things like the power and the lights and such, so there’s really almost no actual work for anybody to do. It’s a paradise of pastel outfits and serene boulevards and plazas. That is the set up.

Seriously, I’m not obsessed with Agutter, it’s the pastel outfit she’s modelling you’re meant to be looking at!

All is not spiffing in paradise though, there is a price to be paid and the piper has some serious henchmen to collect the dues. The piper of course is the shadowy computer that runs things, and the henchmen are the Sandmen (who put your lights out – a reference to the little light-up crystals everybody has been implanted with in the palm of their left hand – see Revelation, 13:16 for similar thinking). The Sandmen aren’t just random henchmen though, they have a job to do, and that job is to hunt Runners. The people in the city only get to live until they’re thirty, after which they’re meant to go to a communal death with everybody else who’s thirty, in a cermony called Carousel. The obligation to die is put on the citizens by reminding them that living any longer would be greedy, and the hope is that at Carousel, they will renew (get another thirty years on their little palm crystals), although nobody ever does renew… Not that anybody thinks about that much, they’re so indoctrinated that all they ever think about is who to hump today (for the most part).

Modelling fetching Sandman black and a worringly red lifeclock crystal is a sweating Michael York as Logan

Not everybody is thrilled about dying at thirty though, and so they try to run, try to escape the domes of the city and out into the unknown wider world that they’ve never even seen, in the hopes that they’ll find a nice B&B (or something – none of these people have ever handled anything rougher than a cushion), as bush-ready survivalists they ain’t. Disturbed by the trend for people to run off, the computer tasks our man Logan to try to discover the escape route and eventual hideout of the Runners, which, as a top-gun Sandman, he’s of course only too happy to do. Don’t think badly of him, he has no choice at this point.

Seizing the curvaceous Jessica, who is in the underground and who, up until this point, has only been in the film to expose the audience to the hedonism of city life, and explaining to her that he’s done being a Sandman, Logan convinces her to help him to get out. This offends Francis beyond words, who relentlessly chases the pair of them like an enraged butler armed with a deadly energy gun thing (laser, sparkly-death ray, I’m not sure – it’s never explained). We are left to question whether Logan is genuine, or is he simply carrying out his mission – not something we can actually decide properly until almost the very end of the film.

As with many films, we get the totally unecessary and obligatory nude shot of the female lead, which in Logan’s Run is set up so poorly as to be almost comedic, but instead of being the erotic and cheeky peek at a beautiful woman, it comes off as cheap and rather chauvinistic. This film of course isn’t the only one to use feminine nudity as a draw, but for me, Jenny Agutter’s character would have been far better off without it. Jessica is a strong and thoughtful woman led by an unshakeable morality, and seeing her with nothing on added nothing at all to the film. But there we are.

The film asks its audience a LOT of questions, underneath all of the pastel and boobs, and those questions are left to a Peter Ustinov cameo to try to piece together in a touching, if somewhat incomplete way. How long should we live as people? Should we choose who to make babies with like we might choose what kind of pet dog to get? Does society need to be micromanaged? How sadistic are people when given ultimate authority? How easily led are people? Would the world be better off without us? The film made a good fist of answering these questions and, although yes it could have been done better perhaps, I think that it was as good as it could have been done at the time. The thoughts put into Logan’s Run are deep and require much soul-searching, and to go through all of that without boring the audience or laying too much on them at once is quite something. For that reason, I’m going to give this film a 7/10, and a firm reminder to get your thumb out and watch it before it’s cluster-fudged by the remake hoving into view as we speak.

Thumbs aren’t for sitting on!

Westworld (1973) REVIEW

 

Back before The Terminator (1984) and the phased plasma rifle with the forty watt range, we had the film Westworld, which I had only ever heard of when it was spoken of in mocking tones with snickering comments relating to Yul Brynner being an android. I had literally no idea what that meant, so, when I got the chance to watch Westworld, I did.

Starring Richard Benjamin, with James Brolin, Alan Oppenheimer AND Yul Brynner (Brynner really isn’t in the film all that much), Westworld does what The Terminator couldn’t – it imagines a world where ordinary human beings use artificial intelligences and the machines that these minds are put into as consumer goods – items to be enjoyed. What would a world be like where you could go on a holiday to a state of the art resort and play out whatever fantasy you chose, well, whatever fantasy you chose from what was on offer, anyway?

In the resort, Delos, there’s Romanworld, where you get to live out whatever Bacchanalian debauchery you like, there’s Medievalworld, where you get to be the romping, swordslinging knight of the court, and of course Westworld, where most of the film is set. In Westworld, you get to be a gunslinger, and fight the bad guy and drink two fingers of rye and get into bar fights. And then there’s the sex. The three worlds are populated by androids controlled by their own discrete onboard AI – programmed for a given role such as servant, baddie, prostitute… …and the sexually functional models will have it away with the guests at the drop of a hat, no extra charge. (Male and female models available.) So that’s the set up.

Already, we’ve been asked a tonne of difficult questions by the film and it hasn’t really gotten going yet. Is it moral to go and have sex with an android? Would it be cheating on your spouse if you did? What about the fact that the machine runs to a program yes, but it does think for itself; is it really still a machine? Is it okay to damage an android in the pursuit of fun as the film’s holiday makers do left and right? What does it all say about us? Westworld doesn’t ask these questions just to be challenging, it asks these questions knowing full well, even in 1973, that humanity would one day be answering these questions not as a hypothetical, but as a real issue to be decided with all the force of morality and law weighing upon them.

The paradise of drinking and sexing and fighting and killing (all in total safety, it must be stressed, as it is repeatedly by the resort reps) doesn’t last though, and soon enough, the machines begin to show the telltale signs that they’ve had enough. What starts off with the terrible and, the reps assure us, accidental death of James Brolin’s character John Blane in a gunfight with Brynner’s Gunslinger, quickly degenerates into a full scale slaughter of most of the resort guests and nearly all the resort staff. This sets up the scenes where Brynner’s increasingly damaged Gunslinger chases Richard Benjamin’s increasingly desperate Peter Martin through the resort in an exchange that bares more than a little resemblance to the Sarah Connor/Terminator chase in the end of James Cameron’s The Terminator eleven years later.

Once you realise that the film was written and directed by THE Michael Crichton, the depth of the piece ceases to shock, and you’re left pondering the questions that it raises. The film did have a sequel, which I also liked, called Futureworld with Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner, which you should check out for the different angle that it brings to the AI discussion. There, the issue is corporate power and the use of androids that could pass for humans, and it’s well worth a look.

Overall I’m going to give Westworld a 9/10. I know how badly Hollywood would maul any remake of it, so I’d say that it’s best left alone, and enjoyed for what it is. My final verdict is that it’s an unfairly maligned classic that was way ahead of its time and is as relevant today as it was when it was made.