Once Were Warriors

Introduction

Once Were Warriors came in the year 1994, the film was based on the bestselling novel of Alan Duff. The movie is about the story of urban Maori family-the Hekes and the issues that this family faced. The issues that this story tells include domestic violence, alcoholism, and poverty; these issues were brought by family patriarch Jake. The movie stars Temuera Morrison and Rena Owen, and is directed by Lee Tamahori.

Movie Review

In the movie, the prominent source of aggression is Jake-the patriarch. Jake discharges early on and after that spends most of his time in bar with his friends fighting and/or drinking, or in house drinking and fighting, physically and mentally with his kids and his wife. The more interesting role in the movie is of Beth-wife of Jake. The role of Beth is exasperatingly un-dimensional and flat. The character of Beth receives large amount of screen time. Their children are Grace, Nig, and Boogie; Nig leaves his family in order to join a gang that participates in the Maori customs of tattoos; whereas Grace is the lost intellectual who suffers the bulk of the distress and pain that her family imposes in the cruelest part of the movie. Boogie is the son who finds himself in community welfare because of the inability of his parents to lay him off the streets (Duff, pp.43).

Once Were Warriors depicts brutal situation and the movie can be summarized in the first shot. The movie camera captures a beautiful landscape of New Zealand and as the camera turns out towards a dirty neighborhood and busy highway, what the viewers find is just a billboard. The movie just shows that- it directly turns away from something remotely scenic and focuses on life that manages to survive on the other side of the road.

Once Were Warriors depicts a complicated story, however this movie is a worth watch because of what it depicts about the issues that are faced by the Maori culture in today's world. The major themes of gender relations, domestic violence, and misplaced history can overtake the Maori culture and some other cultures that have class of individuals living by the highway. So, in this logic, it surpasses national borders, however there is no need to surpass the social ones (Duff, pp.100).

The director of Once Were Warriors, in his directional presentation, brings the thematic threads together in context and ...