DJariya

I rented the BD yesterday and this movie was really good. Unfortunate that this movie got buried in December with hardly any theaters open and at the height of the pandemic surge. This deserved to be seen by more people. I would have seen this in the theater had it been an option at the time.

Hanks was great as was Helena Zengel. They had some really great moments in the movie.

OldBoy

he does great parts, mostly, but he’s also had stinkers. Larry Crowne, Hologram movie, Cloud Atlas, the Langdon religious related movies, I think made bank overall, but dwindled quickly, a little too many docu dramas. I mean I would argue or at least that is a good question, but who’s played more real people on camera? I say Hanks by a lot.

JeffTheAlpaca

Hologram for a King was not awful and probably the best in that list.

This was better than what I expected.

It has been awhile since Hanks has won a Oscar and maybe he could have gotten one for this.

News of the World and not Borat 2 should have gotten more Oscar nominations.

I assume this will be the start of a great career for Helena.

johnnysd

Really liked this movie. Appreciated that it showed how much the Old West just sucked when it gets down to it. Had a predictable arc but didn't care. Only small thing I might have changed would be to have Coda reading the news and telling a story at the end,

dvdjunkie32

Movie didn't live up to my expectations, but it's good enough to add to my collection and I'll watch it again. The movie just really sags in the middle and I had a hard time investing in Hank's character when he kept making stupid illogical decisions. However, the ending drew me back in emotionally. It's a sweet little western story, not something epic.

kahuna

You can buy this in 4K on iTunes or Amazon Prime & it's (MA).

TomOpus

It was added to HBOMax yesterday or day before.

JeffTheAlpaca

Wow this is only a two page thread

GoldenJCJ

Caught this tonight on HBOmax. What a wonderful little gem of a film! I thought it was fantastic from start to finish. Hanks was good as always but the girl who played Johanna was also fantastic and ended up being the heart of the movie.

It’s definitely the best western I’ve seen in the last few years. I love watching movies that tell a story of a little chunk of history that hasn’t really been told before.

I also didn’t realize this was a Paul Greengrass movie until the end credits. It’s definitely a departure for him. I wouldn’t have thought one of the better westerns in recent memory would be directed by Greengrass. Shows what I know. I suppose, in hindsight I can crack jokes about the shaky cam in some of the runaway wagon shots but as I was watching, I didn’t find them distracting at all. The cinematography was great throughout. The movie made great use of natural light.

It’s a shame this didn’t make much of a dent during award season. It’s one of the best from last year.

Daytripper

Agree with all that. It made my top 10 for 2020. And yeah, I know, lean year with releases overall. But what a wonderful film.

DJariya

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/...ref_=bo_se_r_1

It's sad this movie bombed. It only made $12M.

However, Universal just dumped it during Christmas when most theaters in the U.S. were closed. I know the theaters in California were shuttered when this opened. I wasn't able to see this until it hit BD months later.

It's a great movie. Too bad it didn't get many eyes on it. Hopefully some more people will watch it now that it's on cable and streaming.

L Everett Scott

It's great this movie is getting love here. The performances are solid from top to bottom, and the cinematography captures the open plains beautifully. As mentioned upthread, the news readers are a bit of U.S. history that simply don't come up in school or even most conversations about that period so it's awesome that they're getting some attention in a big studio film.

Having said all that, the script fell into a trap that a number of stories of this type tend to: ignoring the upbringing of a child. IIRC Jefferson Kyle Kidd only ever refers to the girl as Johanna even though she was brought up as Cicada. The Kiowa brought her up so she knows their culture and speaks their tongue. At every turn, she tries to escape to go back to her people.

Despite all this, at no time does JKK ever consider that Cicada should return to the Kiowa and insists on dragging her through dangerous territory to a family she doesn't know and who presumably wouldn't even recognize her. I know that it's possible that when Greengrass and Luke Davies sketched out the plot that they may have started with the ending they wanted and worked backwards from there, but the story they came up with fails to sell the idea that the girl couldn't simply go back to the people she knew and grew up with like she wanted. IIRC the excuse is that her adopted parents were killed by a U.S. Cavalry raid, but that doesn't justify tearing a child away from a culture she knows to go live in one that's completely alien to her.

I know cases like this have happened in real life where children are taken from families that adopted and raised them to 'return' them to biological kin who are essentially complete strangers to them. Circumstances vary, and the courts (who are usually involved in such cases) would have their reasons for inflicting this type of trauma on the kids and the adopted family. If we're talking about a case like this one where a girl of about ten years of age has only ever known one group of people fights tooth and nail to go back to them, forcing her to live with a family she doesn't know whose language she can't even speak just seems cruel.

I'm aware that this is a 21st century lens I'm using and that JKK obviously has a very different view, one that bases where Cicada belongs on her papers and the way she looks with the prevailing attitudes of settlers towards Native Americans playing a part as well. I just wish Greengrass and Davies had done more work to show the movie absolutely had to end up where it does because the story doesn't feel right, that it plays out the way it does just because the writers wanted it to.

Runaway

I feel you and me have watched two different movies. In my opinion they showed really well that the girl has lost everything she knew twice. The first family she barely remembers and the the family she knows were basically her kidnappers. So while your notion that someone who kidnapped a child should keep her. since she doesn't know anyone else ist absurd, the movie shows quite well the trauma she has to face. She wants to live with her captors because she knows hardly anything else, but I defintely don't think the movie is ignorant to her dilemma, not at all. It's a story about two people who've lost everything and everyone they love and bond over their shared trauma.

Johanna's family had been killed and she was kidnapped and raised by their killers, she supressed the trauma (the memory returns to her) and than as Cicada she had to endure the same thing all over again. The movie shows how she finds her own family with JKK.

GoldenJCJ

^ ^ They didn’t write it that way because there is literally no way she would have been returned to the Kiowa under any circumstances. A kidnapping victim wouldn’t stay with her captors in post-Civil War America and she wouldn’t stay with her kidnappers in 21st America either.

The point of the movie was that Johanna was victimized several times over her life and lost multiple sets of families. There was no good solution for her throughout much of the movie. Returning to the Kiowa wasn’t an option and returning to her blood family didn’t “feel” right either but sometimes that’s the unfortunate reality. We also saw as the movie progressed that Johanna began remembering her life before she was captured and she began to realize that she didn’t belong with the Kiowa either.

You could argue that Capt. Kidd was being insensitive by referring to her as Johanna instead of Cicada but he was only referring to her by her birth name. I suppose the movie could have made it a plot point to change her name yet again to something she chose but it would have been a mostly unnecessary story point.

L Everett Scott

@Runaway and @GoldenJCJ we're definitely seeing the film differently. You use terms like captors, kidnappers, and killers, but it's really not that black and white, is it? Innumerable Native Americans were slaughtered by colonists and they retaliated which resulted in numerous deaths of European settlers. The film certainly doesn't suggest it was common for indigenous people to adopt the young of those they killed so we can assume this was an extremely unusual case where some Kiowa felt the need to take care of a child they orphaned.

By today's legal definitions, yes, that's kidnapping. But if we were to compare the circumstances in the film to that of the 21st century, the setting would have to be in an unstable part of the world. If Countries A and B had constant skirmishes and a girl from B were left on her own as a result of an attack by the forces of A who then decided to spare and care for her, you can call that kidnapping, but how would A get the child back to B if the two have no diplomatic ties and are intensely distrusting of one another? In a scenario like that, it would make sense for A to hold onto the girl while hostilities were still going on, and that presumably could mean years as is the case in the film. A didn't want to kill the girl or leave her to die, so now she's become a part of their family and the world she knows is that of A. The circumstances involving two sides with a deeply fractious relationship make really muddies the waters, so it's not just a clear-cut case of using biology to determine where the child should go.

A movie with sort of a similar theme that handles the nature vs. nurture question much more effectively is Shoplifters. That film also involves a little girl who is taken from her biological family and is cared for by her 'captors' but she makes no attempt to leave because she went from a neglectful environment to a very caring one.



Had News of the World been made before revisionist Westerns were a thing, the Kiowa would definitely have been portrayed as brutal, murderous villains and completely demonized. I'll be the first admit that if this movie had done that, I could understand a lot better JKK wanting to get Cicada to her biological family regardless of how little emotional connection she had with them and vice versa. Of course, that would be a rather problematic treatment of Native Americans and we would have ourselves a different discussion.

Similarly, the screenplay would've worked better if it had delved deeper into the views of settlers towards the indigenous population during that period. Given the way of thinking at the time, seeing a white child living with Native Americans would've been unthinkable so the instinct would be to 'get her back where she belongs', especially since she has papers indicating who her blood relations are. Had the movie been more explicit about these attitudes then JKK's actions would be easier to accept.

But Greengrass and Davies have Tom Hanks as their leading man and don't want him to be so hard-edged, so he's a moderate Confederate who never says anything along the lines of 'this girl doesn't belong with Native Americans' or 'we have to keep this girl away from her kidnappers/captors'. (In fact, I don't recall any character saying anything like that.) Instead, we have a sympathetic protagonist who seems to be very empathetic...except when it comes to Cicada wanting to go back to the people who raised her. That's the part where the very decent, kind-hearted character butts up against the narrative; JKK needed to have an edge, some prejudice towards the Kiowa so his imperiling both himself and Cicada to get her to a group of strangers would make more sense.

Also, the screenplay does very much contain a revisionist view of Native Americans. When they do finally appear on camera, they seem quite understanding of our heroes' plight

Yes, we're shown the girl's still blood-stained home, but the post-dust storm scene acts as a strong counterpoint, especially since the house is the scene of an attack that took place years before while the encounter with the Kiowa is shown on camera.

To me, Greengrass and Davies's sanding down the rough corners really hurts the film. It doesn't want to make JKK look bad in any way so it never even hints that he may have negative attitudes towards Native Americans nor does it want to make the Kiowa look like monsters so they come off as being sympathetic as well.

What this leaves us with is the conversation we're having now. Outside of the film, we get to talk about the Kiowa being killers and kidnappers and how settlers would never dream of letting a white child live with indigenous people regardless of how many years she spent with them. That's all fine and good, but the screenplay either waters down these points or omits them completely so it becomes necessary for us to assume that JKK has certain views that would preclude him from ever considering returning Cicada to the Kiowa.

To my way of thinking, the Captain's adventures as a news reader could've been better served by dropping the Cicada storyline altogether. I think there's a better movie to be made about travelling the country and entertaining audiences with news and with luck, we'll get that film someday.

milo bloom

I have to agree with the last post, especially this bit here:
The story of taking Cicada to her "rightful" family wasn't strong enough for what the movie wanted. The little girl was great in the part, and Hanks seemed to have a real rapport with her, but I also came away thinking more could have been done to show why it was necessary for him to take her to her blood relatives. The scene where she gets the other Natives to give them a horse shows she still has a connection to them, and it stands out as odd against the overall plot.

I didn't hate it. Even knowing where it would end up it was a mostly enjoyable ride. With a little more work it could have been a little more compelling, as it stands it was a decent way to spend a couple hours.