Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.
This is the first in a series of twelve films suggested by Chip Lary at Tips from Chip.
A film like Once Were Warriors is not the sort of thing that gets summed up in a single sentence or even a single paragraph. Earlier this month I reviewed Father Goose and suggested that it was a film with multiple personality disorder because it encompassed multiple genres. Once Were Warriors doesn’t encompass multiple genres, but it does address any number of problems and social issues. Is it about poverty? The treatment of indigenous cultures? Spousal abuse? Yes to all of these, but it’s really about masculinity and a sort of male impotence in the modern world.
What happens when a warrior culture can no longer be a warrior culture? More than anything, that’s what Once Were Warriors asks, and it gives a series of different answers. For the five characters with whom we mainly are concerned, the answers are all different, and the answers offered to us at the end as the right ones are probably the ones we though we right going in.
