Text: Captain
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With the re-screening of "Avatar" in domestic theaters, "Avatar" surpassed "Avengers 4" and once again secured the top spot at the global box office . From this point of view, the appeal of the film to the audience is still the same. It's just that another excellent movie with a similar theme has received little attention, and it is "Dances with Wolves" .
As a Western film released thirty years ago , it is a treasure for moviegoers. Although Westerns had been in decline for 20 years at the time, Kevin Costner still won the Best Director Oscar for this film . He jumped out of the rut of Western films and told the collision of civilizations in the West in an anti-typal way .
If winning the Best Director Award is just a kind of luck, then winning multiple awards at the same time , especially the Best Picture Award, is a full affirmation of the Academy Party's film . Faced with such a classic film, there are naturally countless interpretations of it. Therefore, I can only start with the similarities and differences between "Dances with Wolves" and "Avatar", and briefly analyze "Dances with Wolves" .
one
Starting with the same things, the stories of both are set in the future and the past, a relatively safe point in time from the audience . Although "Avatar" is set on the planet Pandora in 2134, it, like "Dances with Wolves", is based on the history of white European colonization of the Americas .
Furthermore, the first half of both films are narrated through marginal figures of society . The audience drifts between the two cultures from the perspective of the narrator. In the process of contacting the demonized alien civilization, they gradually gave up their original position, and finally followed the civilization of their choice to defect to the old master .
From the perspective of human history, the advancement and backwardness of civilization are not defined by productivity alone. The geographical isolation of Native Americans led to inefficiencies in productivity , and was naturally no match for white Europeans with guns and germs.
But in the end it turned out to be the values of white supremacy , which in the 1930s were substituted by filmmakers for a genre unique to Americans—the Western. Take the western master Ford as an example. In his early film "Flying Through the Mountains", Indians were vilified as savages who violated civilized society . It wasn't until 1956's "The Searcher" that he corrected his early mistakes.
Changing the audience's stereotype of a certain civilization is the theme that both directors want to express.
two
After talking about the similarities, it is natural to discuss the differences. Because of the different creative concepts of the two directors, "Dancing With Wolves" has done a lot of work on the story, while "Avatar" is fully pursuing special effects .
In "Dances with Wolves", the vulgar coachman takes Lieutenant Demba (Kevin Costner) to the frontier. When the coachman devoured the box of cans, he threw the can on the Indian prairie, and the director gave a reaction shot of Lieutenant Demba despising the coachman.
Although this scene is not full of too much drama, it shows the director's attitude and effectively shows that the industrial civilization has invaded the life of the nomadic civilization little by little.
In order to show the clash of two civilizations more realistically, the director used a large number of Indian actors, and for the first time used their language as the main language of the film, while English was reduced to subtitles .
At the same time, in order to portray the characters, the director uses events such as the capture of bison by the Sioux and the war with alien tribes, so that the audience abandons the original stereotype and allows everyone to judge the upcoming battle between the white and the Sioux from a new angle. It is such little details that stitch together the epic "Dancing With Wolves".
Cameron partially followed this approach, but his narrative was only for special effects . However, special effects are only one form of telling a film, and directors need to use various forms to make the audience emotionally resonate . But Cameron's apparent focus on special effects has brought the film back to a simple binary opposition . Perhaps every film that leads the way in technological innovation has something to be desired.
"Dancing with Wolves" above the picture "Avatar" below
Kevin Costner used a lot of real shots to show the poetic natural life . The director said through the mouth of Lieutenant Demba: The surrounding fields are like my dreams, and there will be no such pure land on earth. This also paved the way for him to choose to defend this pure land in the future.
And Cameron chose to use special effects shots to present a spectacle . We just sleepwalked on Pandora with "Jack", like children walking into a theme park, for fear of missing every chance to be amazed. This also causes all Cameron's efforts to seem to be for the final battle, which is enjoyable but has no nutrition.
Epilogue
Similar themes have two endings due to different creative ideas.
"Dancing With Wolves" is an anti-genre western, in the face of the torrent of the times, the hero no longer has the ability to decide the situation.
As a sci-fi film, "Avatar" has not essentially jumped out of the template of western films, so it also weakens the deeper reflection that should be brought to the audience.
Modern life pushes people to speed up, and audiences are more willing to accept films with stronger sensory stimulation. But we might as well slow down and enjoy the heaviness unique to classic movies.
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