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Dances with Wolves (Special Extended Edition) Customer Reviews (10 - 12 of 64 Reviews)

Great Movie Compromised
I haven't bought this "special extended edition," and won't. I've seen it, however, and I find the additional scenes jarring to the point of distraction, and they don't improve the movie.

I'm a purist. I want to see the film the director wanted me to see when he released it to the theaters. I want to see the film he'd made--not one frame more, not one frame less--when he was done with it. In almost all cases, this is the movie actually shown in theaters.

Generally, I'm not even curious to see the "director's cut," the second-guessing of the filmmaker. Every artist, especially filmmakers and writers, would change their finished work if they could take another stab at it. I guarantee that if Mark Twain could return from the dead and you handed him Huckleberry Finn, he'd take a blue pencil and make a thousand corrections, from changing hundreds of punctuation marks to adding or deleting entire scenes.

The project has to end sometime. And every artist has a variety of reasons why this or that was left out of the finished work. For example, in a hypothetical filmmaker's case, an arbitrary time-length--say, 180 minutes--is the kind of routine limitation (along with deadlines, actor availability, budget, weather, location) every filmmaker has to put up with. If we gave filmmakers unlimited time and unlimited budgets, movies would never get finished because filmmakers would never stop tinkering.

On the other hand, if the movie was censored for controversial content (e.g., the movie showed around the world in one version, but needed clipping to get a distributor here), then the foreign version is the movie I want to see because that was the director's finished vision at the time of the original release.

The Extended Editions is not a compromise
There's not much one can say about this magnficent achievement in film-making that hasn't already been said by others, so I'll content myself with just discussing one key point.

The four hour edition is not a compromise or an explotive "director's cut" that studios often put out just to sell another copy. This version is closer to what Costner orignally envisioned, and the orignal team was initmately involved in producing it. The movie was edited down to 181 minutes at the order of the studio/distibutors. They felt people wouldn't sit through a four hour movie. Who knows, they may have been right. Besides, a shorter length means you can run it more times and sell more tickets. Since the studio was gambling big with this movie (no one guessed it would be the monster hit it was) already, they probably wouldn't have released it at all at its original length.

This version has a differnt feel to it than the theatrical release. It explains more (like why the fort was abandoned when Dunbar arrived) and in some places it's darker. The Sioux are not all purely good. The scene where the Indians catch the buffalo hunters and Dunbar's reaction to what's going on (in the extended edition) is very, very powerful. We are quite fortunate that we at home can see both versions of the film. BTW, this wasn't because of DVD, both the long and theatrical versions were released in VHS letterbox.

It's interesting to compare and contrast the theatrical and Extended versions. One complaint; It's a pity that the theatrical version in widescreen is no longer available new on DVD. This is one movie that should NOT be relegated to pan and scan. Thank goodness I've still got my letterboxed VHS copy!



Why aren't there more films of this quality?
Time has proven "Dances with Wolves" to be a timeless masterpiece that, if anything, improves with age and strengthens in impact. Before purchasing the DVD Special Extended Version I last watched a video of this fine movie not long after it won the Oscar. I bought the CD sound track soon after and it is one of my most-played CD's. But for one reason or the other, I delayed purchasing the video/DVD. Yesterday I found the Special Edition in the DVD bin at a local store (sorry Amazon!) and decided the time had come. That same evening I watched it and was once again transported to a world that is all at once wonderously enchanting, breath-takingly beautiful, and excruciatingly cruel. The extra minutes take nothing away from the movie's enjoyment, and, as numerous commentators have already mentioned, is the best way to watch it. I recommend this movie to all. It is a purchase you will never regret, and will long enjoy.

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