There was a surprising-yet-sobering-yet-frustrating-yet-oddly-satisfying epiphany in the wonnnnnderful little film Local Hero. When the “natives” find out that the Big Oil Company wants to buy their village
and that they’ll raze it to build a refinery
and the villagers are secretly meeting in the church
and want to get as much money as possible for their village
and are even more materialistic and mercenary than the oil execs.
The movie is excellent, and worth watching despite any spoilage. The performances, the music (Mark Knopfler) and the script are magical.
Extra points if it’s because a sudden growth spurt makes her breasts expand* to the point where their size and weight interfere with her athletic ability
*For real! Actress Soleil Moon Frye had to get breast-reduction surgery three months before her sixteenth birthday!
Little Big Man. Okay, it wasn’t “about” the Battle of Little Bighorn, but that battle was in it, Custer was portrayed unsympathetically (he was nuts), and the Indians were pretty much the good guys.
So? The film got made and people watched it. If you had seen the movie and felt the same way as you understand a few others to feel about that movie – what would be your point?
Conquest-minded, subjugating empire vs. a horribly insular, backwards natives? Basically “Imperial Japan vs Corrupt Hick Town,” to go by the archetypes?
Probably the best way to spin that would be as a cautionary tale, or an allegory. But depending on how dark you want to play it, you could make the moral “yes, the Empire™ is brutal, cruel, and self-interested but they’re at least capable of technological and cultural progress—the Natives™ they conquered stagnated, and now there’s nothing left for them but suffering horrifically for it.”
The popular Robin Hood, the one most of us know, is fighting for the oppressed, not assassinating a popular President on behalf of a mysterious consortium. Can you come up with an actual workable example of this hackneyed tradition you described?
And I really think you’re thinking it over too much Many of the other inversions mentioned in this thread would ALSO wear thin if done feature-length, and/or potentially elicit the* “Hey! That’s not funny, man! That’s a terrible thing when it happens in reality!” *reaction from a large segment of the public.
Some of us just enjoy contemplating the what-ifs of a curveball thrown at the public’s sensibilities once in a while. Not as a regular, repetitive thing, mind you, that becomes shock-jockery, just being annoying for its own sake.
So I’d likely lose $50 million making that movie… which is why I wouldn’t make it until after having several hits under my belt (More seriously, maybe I’m just not of the school that an auteur has to avoid work that may be possibly given unsavory interpretations.)
I can’t think of a movie that does this exactly, though Little Big Man comes close, but in books, you have got to take a look at the *Flashman *series by George Macdonald Fraser, especially Flashman and the Indians. The conquest of the natives is portrayed as tragic but inevitable, with a substantial helping of asshats on both sides of the conflict–and the titular Flashman, of course, the worst of the bunch.
And another movie to like starring a generally douchebaggy actor - the Maverick movie’s interactions featuring the Native American who plays up the stupid/superstitious native thing in order to shake down a Russian nobleman for cash.
That last one would make a really interesting movie, I think. After all, Nazi Germany surely had criminals of the ordinary sort, just like everyplace else. A plot along the lines of “Genuine war criminal SS officer hunts murderer” could be a neat character study, if done well.
I walked away from The Pursuit of Happyness with the exact opposite opinion of what the director was going for. I saw a selfish failing father put his child through misery for the chance to roll the dice on one more pipe dream, that it worked is irrelevant.
There’s the alt-history novel and movie “Fatherland” starrring Rutger Hauer as a Nazi detective in 1960s Germany. In the story WW2 ended in a stalemate between the western allies and Germany. In the 60s, President Joe Kennedy is making the first official visit to the Reich by an American president. Hauer’s character becomes involved with unraveling a conspiracy that covered up the Holocaust.
What’s YOUR point? I really don’t understand why you brought up Apocalypto at all, since it doesn’t sound that much like the movie suggested by JRDelirious. I certainly never said it would be impossible to make a movie with Native American villains, I said it would be considered offensive to make a movie where all the Native American characters were evil (except for the sexy love interest of the white hero) and no more deserving of sympathy than their white conquerors. Apocalypto apparently presented a far more balanced view of Native Americans than the hypothetical movie we’ve been discussing, with both the good guys and the bad guys being Maya, and it was still considered offensive by some for the same reasons I suggested. A more extreme movie would be considered even more offensive.
Isn’t this basically what I said back in post #22? This kind of idea might be funny in a comedy skit but would be considered offensive as a serious feature film.
One of my favorite TV gems was an episode of the new Twilight Zone, called “A Small Talent for War.” Earth gets word of an impending visit by ultra-powerful aliens who threatens the end of the world in a matter of days unless humans do something about their endless wars.
Subsequently, the world’s leaders gather at the U.N. to hammer out a treaty abolishing warfare, eliminating all their weapons, etc.
That was a great episode. The alien was castigating Earth for its “puny weapons” and “petty wars.” He pointed to the United Nations and said “This building’s very existence tells us all we need to know about Earth.”
Everyone assumes the aliens are, like the ones in “Day the Earth Stood Still,” idealistic pacifists who want us to abandon militarism.
Instead, he was angry that we hadn’t invented MORE powerful weapons and waged war on a greater scale- making us useless as intergalactic Hessians, which is what he WANTED us to be.
Many of the other inversions mentioned in this thread would ALSO wear thin if done feature-length, and/or potentially elicit the* “Hey! That’s not funny, man! That’s a terrible thing when it happens in reality!” *reaction from a large segment of the public.