Avatar Dances with Wolves

Abstract

Dances with Wolves is an epic western movie adapted by writer/ director/star Kevin Costner from a novel by Michael Blake in 1990. The film cost $22 million, grossed $424 million, and won seven Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Music Original Score, Best Sound, Best Writing Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture—Drama. Avatar (Cameron 2009) is an equally epic sf movie that cost $237 million, grossed $2.7 billion (the highest-grossing film of all time), and won three Academy Awards (Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects). Several critics have commented on the similarities between these two movies, which share themes of frontier exploration, interactions with natives, and a hero who befriends the natives and eschews his own kind (Der Derian, Edwards, Sutherland). In both narratives, the hero partakes to a varying extent of the Campbellian monomyth wherein a protagonist sallies forth into a “region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won”.