Dances With Wolves Critique - Essay Example

Somehow not only survives death but becomes a hero since he acted as a diversion for a federal attack. He is told to choose his assignment and he picks to see the prairie before it is all gone and posted to the Dakotas (Monroe, 44). The mule wagon driver and the fort commander are odd personalities; the fort commander commits suicide after he sends Dunbar to his post, so no one is aware that Dunbar is on his legitimate duty. He mans the post alone after finding it deserted, gradually making friends with nearby Sioux villagers. In yet a different suicide incident, a Sioux lady cuts her wrists mourning her husband but Dunbar stops her. She is a white lady who was raised in the village. She becomes Dunbar’s interpreter and they ultimately fall in love.

The Sioux, the Pawnee, and the whites are all seen as having a conventional despise and hatred of people of other races. There is a great deal of violence: Indian on Indian, Indian on white, white on Indian, and white on white. The Sioux are humanized by being shown all through their lives; hence the viewers’ sympathy stays with them in their wars against the Pawnee, who are depicted as raiders and warriors (Monroe, 167). Dunbar and his interpreter girlfriend are shown making love while she is technically still mourning her husband. The Sioux are shown in a spectacular film buffalo hunting where the whites slaughter a lot of buffalos for just their tongues and skin. On the contrary, the Sioux could not waste any part of a buffalo, even when using insulated stomachs of the buffalos to cook as vessels to carry fire or as pots to cook, while some whites shoot the buffalos from the train for pleasure just to see them fall. The federal soldiers are seen committing cruel acts on animals and are classified as just plain crude (Hunter, 98).

Watching this film automatically arouses some Whiteman’s guilt (especially when if you are white) and makes you more sensitive about treating any human being worthy of respect. When the film was first shown on TV, some vulgar language was curled, but the out footage with extra violence was added to it making it a four-hour, two-night mini-series. John Dunbar, a survivor of the civil war with little knowledge of the American frontier and the plight of the Native Americans who inhabit it, acts as the role model of the film. He is open to different ways of life and he is smart, brave, heroic and loyal. Most native Americans are shown as committed to their families, protecting their way of living, eager to laugh, and living in harmony among themselves, an enormously different picture for this person in many other movies that came before this (Kevin Costner, 112). With the Dunbar the only exception the other white soldiers are depicted as arrogant, ignorant, and brutal. Intensively violent battles scene between the Native Americans and the white soldiers and between different Native tribes are very common in the flow of the movie. Both innocents including children and the participants are shot with guns and or arrows. They are killed with hatchets, knifed, scalped, or in furious hand-to-hand combat. Animal and human blood flow throughout. Many animals including dogs, horses, and buffalos are attacked and shown bleeding or dying. On the hand, the Indians ravage an innocent group of settlers: white soldiers pummel, beat, and ferociously kick the film hero; they also gleefully attack his beloved wolf for the sport of it.

Violence is used as the main theme of the movie though it does not seem to solve the problem. Indians get a worse counter-attack when they attack the innocent settler to appoint of regretting their actions. The white soldiers open war with them killing many of them, destroying their properties, and giving them horrific and insecure lives in their land, something that they could have avoided. On the other hand brutality against animals is evil and unfair since they can do nothing about it (Hunter, 343).