Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, William Bellevue, and ensemble.

Director: Martin Scorsese.

What’s Good: When a legendary filmmaker with a 50-year resume promotes his anticipated film door to door, you know he has a potent point to put forth.

What’s Bad: Mollie, played by Lily, doesn’t get the spotlight as she should have because the story never shifts the perspective to hers.

Loo Break: It is an almost 3.5-hour masterclass, and you are not supposed to miss even a bit.

Watch or Not?: On the most significant screen because it is a cinema that tests your patience and rewards you later. The enhanced visuals will make the journey even better.

Language: English (with subtitles)

Available on: In Theatres Near You!

Runtime: 207 Minutes

User Rating:

An indigenous community called the Osages is ordered to move to Oklahoma, where they discover that the land allotted to them is rich in oils. Soon, the white Americans infiltrate their community to snatch their wealth with nefarious motives and begin the genocide that has no mention in the pop culture but did change the grammar of America.

Killers of the Flower Moon Movie Review: Script Analysis

The legendary Martin Scorsese, over a career that spans 50 years and 25 movies (10 of which have Robert De Niro), and 26th on the big screen now, has always been a trendsetter. With his films, he has managed to introduce the world to new cultures, individuality, style of filmmaking, and the most important of them all, the idea of co-existence and how greed has always demolished it. His social media front, for the ones who follow, is about giving voice to the voiceless and putting forward an opinion unabashedly like a legendary icon of his stature should. So when he decides to make his tenth movie at the age of 80 about an indigenous community that is being eaten up by the white folks like parasites, he wants you to immerse to the point that the last thud hits you harder than a bus.

Killers Of The Flower Moon, written by Martin with the iconic screenwriter Eric Roth, adapted from David Grann’s book, is a story about the Osage community that became wealthy overnight after oil reservoirs were discovered beneath the land in Oklahoma that they were newly assigned after forcing them to migrate from the land they established their culture on. The opening scene of the movie is the Osages conducting a funeral and burying the dead with their last rituals. Soon, you figure out it is a pipe being buried, and it signifies that their roots are being left, and now the white influence will infiltrate their system and the generations to come.

Begins Killers Of The Flower Moon. The greed for the wealth the Osages have made overnight becomes the very reason for their genocide. The blankets they buy with the money and wear over their shoulders make them the very target of the white folks, some of whom are ready to kill them one by one to own what is theirs. We see all of this through a man named Earnest, an army veteran only interested in wealth and women. Totally opposite to his name, his character grows in branched-out directions with every single scene. His consciousness keeps coming towards better, only to run towards darkness in the next scene. And you, as an audience, need to make peace with the chaos. A genocide is taking place; an entire community is on the verge of becoming extinct.

Martin and Eric are in no hurry because they make you sit for almost 3 hours 30 minutes and watch their story unfold. The entire first half is invested only in dissecting what the Osages are, why do they have wealth, what is the flower moon, who its killers are, what is their motivation, and why is no one going against them. The real story about the investigation and the rise of the FBI begins in the second half. It tests your patience for the entire second half but rewards you with a movie that will haunt you with its last frame. It’s the chapter of history that the white folks conveniently ignored from their books. But it took a white man to go against his kind and tell them what they did to an entire community, but never apologized.

The only complaint is that the script never changes its perspective to tell Mollie’s story. Whatever we see of her is through Earnest because it is only when they meet, she comes in the frame. We never meet her without him to know what her mind holds, or what she has felt about the migration that took away her entire family from her.

Killers of the Flower Moon Movie Review: Star Performance

Leonardo DiCaprio, in the hands of Martin Scorsese, is a beast that unleashes at least two times stronger. For a man who comes to this world without any knowledge of it, he slowly starts ruling it. Our understanding of Killers Of The Flower Moon is as much as Earnest’s, and his performance with confusion attached to it in the first half and a devil hiding in the second guides us well through it.

Robert De Niro can not go wrong ever, even when he is the villain you really want to punch when you meet him. The movie never goes into his relationships with his children, wife, or the people around him, though. Lily Gladstone is a phenomenal performer and one that must have at least one release every year. I mean, look at those eyes! They speak volumes even in the scenes with a pin-drop silence.