Utu: Geoff Murphy

For a film intended to tell a particular story, Geoff Murphy's Utu does a poor job transitioning between its various narrative threads. In one shot it will focus on one group of characters and then with a single edit jump to another with barely an establishing shot to tell them apart. It reached a certain point where I couldn't tell the various characters apart and couldn't keep track of their motives. Quite simply, this is a surprisingly difficult film to follow. Even worse, it shoehorns in an unnecessary love story between a young British officer and a Māori woman which makes no thematic sense with regard to the rest of the film. The only part of the film that I truly enjoyed was watching one of the white settlers whose wife had been murdered by the Māori construct an increasingly absurd quadruple-barreled shotgun.

6/10