---
title: "Dances with Wolves (1990) review"
description: "Kevin Costner’s empty-headed monotone reading of the frontier somehow works for me, and I’m as shocked as anyone."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/dances-with-wolves/
---

![A still from Dances with Wolves (1990)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/dances-with-wolves/backdrop.webp)

# Dances with Wolves (1990)

Oct 26, 2025 | 3 min read | Rated 4 out of 5 | Dir. Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner’s empty-headed monotone reading of the frontier somehow works for me, and I’m as shocked as anyone.

Look, I watched the four-hour cut of this for the first time. I love westerns and I know there are a lot of problems with this movie, but despite everything I’m about to say, I do like it. Costner’s voiceovers are delivered in complete monotone and his character is kind of dumb, but somehow his directing, performance, and the story still work for me.

Maybe it’s because this is such a beautiful film - the cinematography is genuinely stunning and the score is incredible. Or maybe it’s that there’s something about Costner’s specific wide-eyed stoic American energy that was necessary to make a movie like this work in 1990. He’s the only one who could’ve sold this particular version of the story, and whatever its flaws, it does ultimately make me feel absolutely terrible about how our relations with Native Americans ended up.

Here’s the thing about Costner in this: he’s very good at making himself look like a complete moron, which is genuinely impressive to pull off. But he’s also undeniably handsome - I get it now. I was genuinely inspired by his beauty in this film, and I finally understand the Kevin Costner appeal that eluded me before.

Now, I can’t talk about this movie without addressing the elephant in the room. Seeing this through the lens of 90s race relations, I understand it’s a bad look to have a white man at the center of a story about the Native American experience. I do think this was probably the only way this story could’ve been told in the year it was released and actually get made by a major studio, but in retrospect it’s kind of sad that it had to be framed this way. What does work, though, are the Native American performers themselves - they’re all incredible and I was so impressed with them throughout.

The major theme of the movie is not judging people based on first impressions, and I think it also digs into the unnecessary, terrible violence - both physical and cultural - that colonialism brings to the people it descends upon. That’s an honorable story to tell, even if the framing through a white protagonist is flawed.

But if I’m being completely honest about why I connected with this so much: I think I like this movie because I just love the Red Dead Redemption games, which feel like the closest piece of media spiritually to what this film is. Those games are also slow and methodical, about reliving life on the frontier, and I yearn for that experience every day. There’s something about the rhythm of daily survival, the beauty of untouched landscapes, and the inevitable encroachment of “civilization” that both this film and those games capture perfectly.

So despite the film’s politics not aging particularly well, I am a fan of this movie - especially when I compare it to The Last of the Mohicans, which I just watched. That film had better action sequences, sure, but I was so much more turned off by and bored by it. Dances with Wolves works so much better for me on almost every level.

I guess what I’m saying is: I just think I’m a Kevin Costner guy, and I gotta go see the Horizon saga now.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/dances-with-wolves/)

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I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side.

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