Dances with Wolves review

 Number 333 on the top 1000 films of all time is the Kevin Costner's 1990 epic Western 'Dances with Wolves.'

Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is a soldier in the US Civil War. In 1863, he is assigned to a military post in the American frontier. Instead of finding his assignment, he finds a group of Lakota. There everything he has ever known is flipped on its head.

I've never rated Costner much as an actor. He's very wooden and over-the-top. After seeing this, I don't rate him much as a director either. Dances with Wolves was a slow-plodding affair that had no business being three hours long. The film centres on Dunbar's relationship with the Lakota, but they barely feature until an hour in - which was also the first sign of tension.

How Dances with Wolves won the Best Picture Oscar is beyond me. How it beat out brilliant films like Awakenings or Goodfellas is even more stupefying. And don't even get me started on Costner being nominated for Best Actor. His constant narration slowed the film to an absolute crawl. He logs all his interactions with the Lakota in a journal. This is accompanied by the slowest, most monotonous, expository voice-over known to man. We see something on screen, and, for some reason, Costner felt the need to over-explain it ad infiniteum. 

It made everything very on-the-nose. It would have been much better if the audience had been left to figure things out for themselves.

Dunbar wasn't an interesting character to follow at all. I was far more interested in the dynamics of the Lakota tribe. It would have been more interesting if the film had been told from their perspective rather than from a tepid soldier who loves the sound of his own voice.

I did not care for Dances with Wolves. It was an overly-long, tedious affair. And how it was the 1990 Best Picture winner is a complete mystery.