Killers of the Flower Moon is directed and co-written by Martin Scorsese (his co-writer is Eric Roth) and is based off of the novel by David Grann and concerns the Osage nation in Oklahoma who strike it rich when oil is discovered on their lands meanwhile a young man named Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes to stay with his uncle King Hill (Robert De Niro) and he starts seeing a local Osage lady named Mollie (Lily Gladstone) but the Osage people are now being murdered for their oil money and Ernest and King might be at the centre of it.
Killers of the Flower Moon the more I have thought about in my mind is a movie that I feel is on the whole good but not a great film and I wish it was now this isn’t to say it’s a bad movie its not but its also one that has some problems.
Firstly the performances in this movie are very good, DiCaprio is I think the weakest of the bunch and I think that he is good in the film but the way he talked really grated with me after a while, De Niro is very good as well as the local mayor like figure of the Osage county near where the oil was found and who has this prospector feel to him but not without his darker side owing to the prejudice against Native American people while Jesse Plemons is very good as well as an FBI agent tasked with investigating the murders.
But the real star here has to be Lily Gladstone, for the first half of this movie she is fantastic and comes across as a real find able to say so much with little more than just her facial expressions and her body language and she develops some real chemistry with DiCaprio in those scenes but sadly at the back end of the film she doesn’t get as much to do and the film suffers for it somewhat as a result.
And there is where I want to mention my issues with this movie and the first of those is the length, at 3 hours and 26 minutes this is a long film to watch in the cinema (and if you can see it in a cinema please do so) and there were numerous times where I checked my watch and because of this long length I feel that the tension and the dread of the Osage murders begins to dissipate after a while and it loses that emotional punch that a more tightly edited version of this story might have been able to bring out.
Now I am not against long movies, James Cameron has proven to be a master of it with the Special Edition of the Abyss as well as Titanic and Avatar: The Way of Water and recently Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer rarely felt its own 3 hour runtime but here it did bother me and I think the movie as a whole suffers from this long length.
And that leads me to my next issue and that is the storytelling, now Marty and Eric Roth were right in their decision to refocus the story to the betrayal of the Osage people instead of the FBI agents tasked with investigating the murders but sadly as a result I feel the film as a whole has this split focus that instead of feeling cohesive in the way that Oppenheimer did it feels like your watching one movie and then another start in its place not unlike how you watch a streaming series and that bothered me especially in the second half.
And so that was Killers of the Flower Moon and it is at the end of the day a good movie but I wish it was a great one with tighter editing helping to bring the 2 main stories into better focus and really heighten the tension and the dread of the story, 3 out of 5.
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