Killers of the Flower Moon finally arrives in theaters tomorrow—my full review will be up tomorrow, too—after what feels like one million years of buildup. Maybe that’s just me, since it filmed up the road from my family in Oklahoma, and I’ve been hearing detailed updates about it since the 2021 production, but I also feel like this movie has received plenty of hype and a little side-eye, since we’re all wondering how Martin Scorsese will handle a sensitive story of Indigenous genocide. We’ll get into it, don’t worry, but short answer…mixed bag.
The final trailer for Flower Moon dropped yesterday, and I want to draw attention to one particular element. The trailer focuses heavily on Leonardo DiCaprio and somewhat on Lily Gladstone, which is as it should be as they are the leads. But there is one shot at the ten second mark where Mollie, Gladstone’s character, looks out a window and sees some men standing around some cars. The central figures in that shot are Jesse Plemons, on the right, and Tatanka Means on the left.
I CANNOT stress enough how BEAUTIFUL Tatanka Means is in this movie. When he shows up it is a Devon-Sawa-descending-the-stairs-in-Casper moment, or an Orlando-Bloom-appearing-in-Fellowship-of-the-Rings moment, or a Robert-Pattinson-in-the-cafeteria-in-Twilight moment, depending on which pants-feeling moment brought your generation hornily online. Means, who is the son of Native American activist and actor Russell Means, plays John Wren, a Native investigator with the early FBI. Look, Flower Moon is a big movie telling a big, important story, and I don’t want to undercut any of that, but I ALSO have to tell you how incredibly hot Tatanka Means is. It doesn’t fit into the proper critique of the film, but just know going in there is a “holy HELL” moment built into the movie and it is Tatanka Means’ arrival.
Also, the film runs just under three and a half hours. There’s not really a good bathroom break point, because there isn’t a mindless action sequence you can miss without dropping anything important, but I would time a break, if you need one, between the two hour and two hour and twenty-minute mark. You don’t want to miss the last hour, for sure.
