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Dances With Wolves Film Analysis

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Film Analysis: Dances with Wolves

Director and actor Kevin Costner’s “Dances with Wolves” (1990) depicts the plight of the Native Americans through the eyes of a soldier. Costner playing Lieutenant John Dunbar keeps a journal and tells much of his story throughout the movie as if he is writing. The film won 7 academy awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Musical Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, and Best Cinematography. The movie tells the story of John Dunbar as he faces the unknown, in a remote Civil War outpost in the west. For months, he is alone with only his horse Cisco to speak to, while waiting for eventual troops to join him. After a period of mutual curiosity and hesitancy, he becomes …show more content…

Dunbar is looking around while beginning to cross the river. There is very little scripted dialogue in this sequence. The most notable pieces of script would be when the soldier Spivey antagonizes Dunbar by saying “Boo!” and “I don’t see nobody” while laughing and holding a rifle right to Dunbars’s chest. A random soldier shouts “Indians!” as the Sioux’s come running out of the trees taking the soldiers by surprise. Aside from those pieces of dialogue we only hear generic cries of pain, as well as pleading, and the war calls of the Indians. The soldiers are attacked, and overcome by the Sioux along the riverbank. Dunbar is able to fight, again using his chains and kills the same taunting soldier, Spivey, that also had stolen his journal before he had arrived at the …show more content…

They have killed his horse, they have killed his wolf, and he knows the time will come when they kill the Indians. This recognition is made clear and most significant in the film by showing the journal washing down the river showing that the past is no longer a part of his life. He has a new life and different future. Dances with Wolves knows that more soldiers will come looking for him and he does not want to lead them to the people he has come to know as his

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