Geronimo - An American Legend | Jason Patric, Gene Hackman

Geronimo - An American Legend | Jason Patric, Gene Hackman | I dislike westerns, but this was incredibly good!

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Geronimo - An Amer...

	Geronimo - An American Legend Jason Patric, Gene Hackman Sony Pictures, 1998 average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Film sadly reduced to 1.33:1

What a wonderful and sad - but also violent - movie!!! The landscape will take your breath away - as will the actors. Every one of them perfectly cast for their role. Also the stunts with the horses, each and every single location - couldn't have been picked better.
What remains a mystery to me though is why Columbia doesn't present this masterpiece in its original widescreen edition.
Also I think Wes Study should be mentioned first; before Jason Patric, Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman. After all he portrays Geronimo. If you have a codefree player I advise you to get the German edition through amazon.de It includes the original English sound in 5.1 Dolby Digital.
The story is well known. Geronimo, the last Apache warrior vs. the US Army trying to hunt him down. They would never have succeeded in capturing him if not for one man: the honorable Southern cavalry officer Gatewood - played by Jason Patric. Walter Hill portrays the characters magnificently, without falling back into the usual cliches while staying as close to the truth as possible. A wonderful and sad story about the power of honesty, trust and loyalty but also about their betrayal.

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I dislike westerns, but this was incredibly good!

A friend who had lent me the Alamo, Rough Riders, Squanto and Gods and Generals pressed this into my hands saying, "this is really good." Uggh, I thought, not another awful cowboy movie! Wow, I was really impressed. This is one of the best movies I have seen in the last five years!

The profound fact is that this is really a war movie set in the U.S. west, about two militaristic cultures who spend a lot of energy trying to kill each other. That sounds simplistic but the complexities are deep and abundant, and are all played out with excellent effect in less than two hours. It is a rare film that can do this in under two hours. This is rare stuff indeed!

The characters are very deep and very complex. The violence (about 50% of the movie) is dramatic and not pretty. No one culture comes away clean, everyone has their massacres. This is war after all. There is no real moralizing here, no good guys and bad guys, this gives it a very real feel.

The Apaches speak what is presumably Apache when they are speaking to each other, and English when not. This gives it a truly bilingual feel. Even the Texans vocabulary is laced with Spanish words, setting them off from others.

There is tremendous suspense. One never knows who will come out alive at any given moment. There is no predictable sense that the leading actors are guaranteed to finish the film. This is played to tremendous effect by Patric and Studi. Duvall's coarseness is a great counterpoint to the more sensitive Patric, and Hackman plays a good balance between bureaucrat and soldier.

The scenery is fantastic, and the sad story of the Apache's losing battle to preserve and express their culture in a shrinking frontier is poignant. There is much to the mix of a variety of cultures in conflict that is expressed very well here in a complex movie. Probably a film that many directors could learn from. I thought this was a tremendous film!

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John Milius - the true genius behind the film

That this film is a treasure is a given. However, prior reviewers fail to provide adequate credit to the person who made it all possible: John Milius. Without his brilliant story and screen play, based upon the research to ensure historical accuracy (for which he is, himself, an American legend), the film would be. . . . a whole lot less, if anything at all.

As an aside, since it is a film and not a doctoral dissertation, the bit of poetic license that was taken to make it a viable film is irrelevant. Personally, I read books for educational purposes and watch films for entertainment purposes. But then I'm also over 50.

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Geronimo

This is the second Walter Hill movie I've seen recently, and I believe I'm getting the hang of it. At least as far as his westerns go. Hill takes as his subject matter a larger-than-life character, in this case the Apache warrior Geronimo, and embellishes the facts to fit a larger truth. I say that without sarcasm or disapproval. Hill turns a bandit queen into a prostitute, kills off one of his characters in the wrong place at the wrong time (to give a big star a death scene,) invents a fight between two men who probably never met, much less knew of each other. There's a good reason this one is subtitled "An American Legend." It's a fair approach for a filmmaker to take, but the raw material of his films have been so finely sifted by so many passionate students for so long they're almost magnets for those prone to nit-pick the tiniest historical accuracy.
When I set aside my concerns for historical accuracy I discovered I enjoyed the heck out of this movie. It looks beautiful, always a plus with a western shot on location. Wes Studi, an American Indian of the Cherokee Nation, really reaches deep into the core of Geronimo - courageous, proud to the point of arrogance, and ultimately doomed. To Hill's credit Geronimo isn't a two-dimensional wooden noble. Likewise, his "bad" guys, in this case racist scout Robert Duvall, aren't caricatures either. Hill doesn't paint in bold contrasts, and GERONIMO: AN AMERICAN LEGEND feels real. This mature approach comes at a price. It's hard to build up to big dramatic moments in an action film when you don't have highly contrasted Good Guys and Bad Guys. Fortunately for the film and the audience GERONIMO'S cast is filled with high-caliber actors able to portray complex characters without losing the audience in the process.
There's also a highly developed sense of intervention in GERONIMO. Gene Hackman's General Crook ("They don't realize it, but I'm the best friend the Apaches have") shields the Indians from a harsh interpretation of his orders. Jason Patric visually embodies this theme - in a number of scenes he steps in between an angry aimed gun and the Native American it's pointed at. Ultimately, I believe, Hill also intervenes between his audience and awkward facts and sour interpretations. It's an approach that drives some historians to distraction, but also occasionally results in highly entertaining movies.

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Superb film, but not historical true.

The film begins with the Crook campaign of 1883 in Mexico, when Geronimo promised to surrender in two months, but he finally surrendered about a year later to Britton Davis (1884).

1)Britton Davis was sent in Arizona in 1882, so he already knew Gatewood when Geronimo surrendered in 1884, after the Crook campaign of 1883. Davis was present in the 1884 surrender, but Gatewood was not, so he led Geronimo to San Carls, alone.
2)Geronimo left the reservation (1885) not because of some forbitten dances, but because the whites had spread rumours that he was to be arrested and hanged. The film does not mension at all the "lost telegram" sent by Davis to Crook.
3) In the next campaign, Davis was not with Gatewood, but with captain Crawford troops. Crawford (a most important figure in the Apache wars) is not mensioned at all.
4) Both Davis and Seiber left the Army in autumn 1885, but the film shows them as members of the group of the last Gatewood mission (1886). Even Chato (the other member of the group) was in a delegation to the north, by that time, so he could not be with Gatewood, and surely not at the prisorer train with Geronimo.
5) At the council of Los Embudos canyon (1886), the film does not mension Tribollet, the mercant who sold liquor to the Apaches and convinced Geronimo and Natchez to leave again.
6) Where is Natchez (a most important chief) ?
7) The real Geronimo campaign was led by a strike force of soldiers under captain Lawton and Leonard Wood, chasing them for four months in Mexico. Gatewwod should meet Lawton and Wood to try to negotiate with Geronimo. Where are Lawton and Wood ?
8)There is no mension of the "Tuscon Ring" which was the real responsible for the last Apache wars, having economical interests.
Despite all this, the film is great, well played by every actor, beautiful photography, serious, spectacular and I found it much-much better than Dances with wolves.

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