Jithindurden

Kind of reminded me of Gone With The Wind with how it's cinematically good with some great human element in it but sticks to a fascist ideology and yet the humanistic side of it is what we get out of it at the end. The writer of the novel this is based on was a KKK leader who wrote it under a native Cherokee pseudonym to trick people into thinking it's not biased. That really makes sense with a whole lot of stuff in this movie.

It's really a thing of awe how in America, you can get away with showing the historical good guys as pure evil, and the guys who fought for straight-up evil can be shown as the paragons of virtue and it doesn't matter. I mean, it's true that there's good and bad on both sides and that's what you'd expect if they aren't making the movie about the victors, this is something you usually expect to be made about the victors and not the losers.

But beyond all of that, the film manages to be much more than those ideologies it is based on. It's shot so beautifully, the pacing is great, and there's so much of it that worked so great that despite all the issues I have with it, I still think it's pretty good. I still won't consider it a great classic. Even beyond the basic politics, there were quite a few stuff that was weird and dated buy Clint Eastwood's experience in making westerns really comes handy when he makes such films so stylish.

An allegory (for the most part) on domestic abuse using a werewolf story. The atmosphere it created through the location, and music worked really well. The acting was really good, especially the ten or so-year-old protagonist. There were a lot of great ideas in it but it kind of feels a little bit stretched when they could've explored a lot more withing the setting. The ending really felt unnecessary explaining away how the girl is an unreliable narrator. There's a lot in the movie that makes sense with that ending but that would be readable even without that. But there are a lot more questions that can rise from that ending. This could've been really great if the script was reworked more. The characters could've been explored a lot more. There were many scenes that felt weird. But even with all that, the idea was good and a lot of it did work pretty well. Definitely felt that it's better than all the reviews give it credit for.

This felt like it was trying to be a spaghetti western and a revisionist western at the same time. This is also one of those instances where the dark comedy aspects are just humorless for me personally. But it usually ends up in two extremes for me, where the supposed comedy is brilliantly written satire that is very effective in its message or it could be just trying to be edgy. Here, it felt more close to being just edgy. I mean, the whole film was trying to be dark and it worked but the way it portrayed stuff, there were a few things that were just disgusting to be portrayed like it did. So even though, this seems to be pretty dated in some aspects, it's still a beautifully shot movie with some possibly mystic elements that feel right to have come out during a time when the westerns were almost in their last leg.