To be honest and say, i really did not enjoy this movie. Although i know it must mean something historically--a dark look at the American frontier and the bitter struggles between the Indians and the settlers in the years following the Civil War, a lot of shooting and editing problems in it made me feel uncomfortable. However, i also noticed that it is not fair to judge an old movie based today's stander since the techniques cannot be compared. The Searchers told a story about two cultures that cannot tolerant each other--Native Americans and White Americans. It may intend to say that the hatred between Native Americans and White Americans is caused by misunderstanding and we should not stereotype or kill each other. However, this intention does not seem obvious to me, instead, i found this movie itself was stereotyping those two groups.
Firstly, i do not like the way the movie portrayed Native Americans. It seems to me that they are stupid, violent, and inhuman in the movie. However, those are only misunderstandings White Americans have towards them, not the truth. They have their culture, their way of living and their emotion, however, i cannot see any of them through the movie. One idea i think the movie was delivered was that kill is understandable and reasonable between White and Native Americans.
Secondly, i really do not think that many sound effects in the movie are necessary. Suspicious music appears frequently, which are distracting and annoying. Also, there were a lot of irrelevant stories going on which made me fail to concentrate on the searching process. The storyline was not very clear and sometimes, the director tried so hard to bring some humor to the movie which, from my point of view, hurt the story. Something that really needs to be shown, such as the process of Ethan's change and the difficulties they were facing when searching for Debbie, was not clear in the movie. So i found the story to be unrealistic because i cannot understand why it took them several years to find Debbie and how Eathen's attitude changed.
Another thing that disappointed me was that there was no exciting moment in the movie. Even there were, they ended too fast. I was expecting a climax since the movie begin, but i never found one. I assumed that there would be one when Scar saw Martin in his temp and i expected a fight between them. However, the story ended in a second after Martin shoted him without showing his face. I do not know is that because of the media regulation at that time or lack of advanced techniques, the gun shot scenes never appeared. Sometimes we only hear the sound of shoting but no image of people got shot.
http://classicfilm.about.com/od/westerns/fr/TheSearchers.htm
I agree that the Native Americans were portrayed as savages but I think that they also showed a lot of similiarities between the white Americans and the Native Americans. This caused the audience to think about why we have these biases against Native Americans and realize that they aren't actually that different.
回复删除I believe the sound was possibly a little excessive but I think it effectively created emothion and helped the audience relate to the film.
I do agree with you though that there really didn't seem to be a climax. The story was quite drawn out and not a clear sense of how much time had passed- the characters didn't seem to change at all.
I too agree that the portrayal of many of the characters are unfair, but it must have been that way because the at the time the audience was conceiving the people to be that way. There was a lot of adventure but real no climax like we are used to, I see that a lot in movies that are trying to teach a lesson, a suitable ending to this kind of movie.
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