A waste of 90 minutes of my life

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This story covers the period from the battle at Little Big Horn to the massacre at Wounded Knee.It's your typical heart-tugging depiction of mistreatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government and its people. The theme is trending since Dances With Wolves. The viewer is supposed to cry or burn with liberal outrage. Look how bad our government treated them. Why didn't people do anything?But if you want to know why people didn't do anything, you can just ask yourself. This is still going on. The U.S. supported government in Honduras has been cheating Native Hondurans out their land. They'll damn a river to make a hydroelectric plant, sell the power to El Salvador or Guatemala and then put the profits in the pockets of politicians and other oligarchs. Entire cultures have been destroyed to build these dams. It's going on right now. Indians have even been killed to clear the way for profits.So as you watch this movie in outrage and cry for the poor Native Americans and curse those who did nothing, take a look in the mirror.

Looking through the reviews, there seem to be lots of people complaining that this wasn't a $100million 5 part epic with most of the dialogue in Sioux. Still, HBO should be congratulated for simply making this movie.The movie could be best described as informative, about events that probably few people know anything about. It covers quite a lot of territory, and renders it digestible.The movie has the usual TV syle camera methods. The acting is a little wooden, and parts are clichéd. It also tries to include the events, the legal matters, and personal stories, which is always difficult, but succeeds to a reasonable degree. There's a story about a young Sioux man and his white wife threaded in, probably to stop the movie simply being about the Sioux and white bureaucrats and soldiers. But this is the price of getting an audience.Not highly memorable, but informative and interesting. Pretty good, by the standards of television movies of the time. Who knows, maybe by 2100 there will be a film about how the US conquered/stole half of Mexico too.

I recently found this movie in searching for Dee Brown's book at the local public library. I recall reading the book when it first came out, decades ago, and I was fascinated--a history book that I could not put down, just like The Exorcist (the book) when I first read it. Dee Brown's book was also a horror story, and the major horror was that it was real.So knowing absolutely nothing about the movie, I borrowed it, thinking that it would be essentially a documentary. Was I wrong! I should have just checked out the book and read it again. Historic atrocities can only be properly dramatized by extraordinarily gifted filmmakers. Anything else is a reduction. But perhaps it is better if someone stumbles upon the Native American genocide done up as a popcorn movie, than never to have any idea at all.The NY Times review complained of some rather obvious analogies to Iraq and Afghanistan. That further illustrates the reduction--would anyone dare use the Holocaust as an analogy for anything else? I don't fault the production, which was polished and accomplished. But HBO should have passed on this.

I believed this film to be quite accurate throughout with one blemish. The last major scene ... the one of the actual massacre. The film portrays it as starting "by an accidental shot" by one of the villagers holding a gun. I believe that to be wrong! The fact is that the soldiers just went right in there to shoot and kill! Not one mention was made of this in the film. There was NO prelude, if you will, to the mass murders because right after Sitting Bull was shot and killed the soldiers/police went straight to the village to murder all his supporters. It was Sitting Bull who rose up again with his Lakota ppl in defiance of the whites because he still felt there was still a chance to salvage the old ways. So, right after Sitting Bull was shot, the soldiers weren't satisfied. So they proceeded to that village so that they could have killed more Lakota!! The massacre DID NOT start by an accidental discharge as it's portrayed in the film! You noticed that soon after the head commander told Charles Eastman that they "did not fire the first shot, I swear by the almighty God" ... those were the words right after he helped murder the Lakota. So not only did he help murder them but he also lied to Eastman! This film is a classic portrayal of murder, treachery and deceit by the whites as is ALWAYS the case! And Dawes was NOT a friend of Eastman's! Dawes just USED HIM to get what he wanted and what every white man wanted .... Lakota land, resources and wealth, that's all!! There was no such thing as "friendship" between whites and Native ppl in those days! If there was, it was usually the white person only wanting to use and abuse him/her, usually for land, money, resources; you know, the usual shebang.But... ANYWAYS... this was still a great movie to watch for those interested in Native history and I would strongly recommend you watch it.