In 2008, my mother Mary Shuker and I had the good fortune to visit one of the most extraordinary, and remote, places on Earth – Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui), a Chilean possession in the mid-Pacific separated from all other land by at least 1000 miles of ocean on every side, and most famous for its huge stone statues, the moai, created centuries earlier as offerings to the gods and as protectors of the island. It only has one town, one shopping street, one church, one hospital, and one tiny cinema, which only screens one movie – and what else could that be but the film Rapa-Nui, which is the movie that I watched on 10 January 2022.
Directed by Kevin Reynolds (who also wrote its plot), co-produced by Kevin Costner and Jim Wilson, and released by Warner Bros Pictures in 1994, Rapa-Nui was filmed on location on Easter Island and stars Jason Scott Lee as Noro, a member of the aristocratic ruling class, the Long Ears, whose clans dominated those of the servile Short Ears several centuries ago.
The movie is a Hollywoodised but mostly accurate retelling of this extraordinary island's mysterious history, its interwoven legends, and its socio-ecological collapse, inasmuch as what is known of them, with a fictional Romeo-and-Juliet love plot at its centre. Namely, Noro is in love with Ramana (Sandrine Holt), a Short Ear, thus breaking a major taboo as a result of which they suffer all manner of emotional turmoil as well as physical torture (especially Ramana), not to mention a bitter falling-out between Noro and his boyhood Short Ear friend Make (Esai Morales) who become avowed rivals when it transpires that they both love Ramana.
It also features a dynamic dramatization of the former real-life Birdman ceremony, in which each Long Ear clan would send a member to scale down the island's steep cliffs, swim across choppy waters to a small islet nearby where he must steal a seabird egg, then return to Rapa Nui, and present the unbroken egg to the king. The first to achieve this hazardous feat enables his clan to choose from their rank the new king for the next 12 months.
Incidentally, although the birdman ceremony definitely occurred, it did so long after the drastic Long Ear vs Short Ear clashes (always assuming that these were more than mere legend, which is what some scholars consider them to be),. Conversely, in the film they are portrayed as occurring at the same time as one another.
Watching this movie, a sumptuous visual feast, brought back many memories, as I recognised so many of the locations featured in it and especially the awe-inspiring moai that we had seen while there. I'd owned the official Rapa-Nui VHS video for several years without getting round to watching it, so it was good to view it at last.
My one regret is that Mom and I didn't watch this film in the tiny cinema while there. After all, how many people can say that they'd watched Rapa-Nui while actually on Rapa-Nui?? Never mind, at least I have the video, which I can watch whenever I want.
Surprisingly, this spectacular movie was not a box-office success, and yet it is one of the most beautifully-shot films that I have ever seen, perfectly capturing the exotic strangeness and bleak panorama of Easter Island. For as featured in the movie, all of its trees had been chopped down centuries earlier to serve as rollers for transporting the enormous moai from the volcanic quarry where they had been created to the various locations some distance away where they were to be erected.
Moreover, during the internecine warfare that raged between different clans on Easter Island, many moai were deliberately toppled over, but today quite a number of them are standing, some having survived the clan conflicts, others having been re-erected in modern times.
If you would like to learn more about Easter Island and what we saw whilst there, please click here to read a comprehensive account on my ShukerNature blog. And for a fascinating glimpse of the surreal scenery and raw emotions unleashed in the movie, please click here to view an official Rapa-Nui trailer on Y0uTube.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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