Clevercell Very disappointing...

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Anssi Vartiainen Ulzana's Raid is a pretty efficient period piece about the horrors of the Indian Wars. It tells the tale of a young lieutenant Garnett DeBuin (Bruce Davison) as he is given the command to track and apprehend a small Apache war party, which has left the reservation led by their leader Ulzana (Joaquín Martínez). With him he has a veteran tracker and army scout McIntosh (Burt Lancaster).The star power of Lancaster, and to a lesser degree Martínez and Davison, cannot be denied. He is a classic gruff and tainted hero of American Wild West, shaded by life, but still willing to travel to the ends of the Earth for the right cause. Ulzana is also an intimidating figure, though given a pretty stereotypical treatment as the savage Indian, but at least they made him calculating and intelligent. DeBuin is the focus character, through whom we experience the story, and it's nice to see him growing from a total greenhorn into an actual officer.Unfortunately the story is extremely dull. Some might call it classic, I call it stereotypical and predictable. Nothing new is tried, it's merely old scenes and tricks after another. I could have told you how the story's going to end after the first five minutes.The pacing is also agonizingly slow and the dialogues are not interesting enough to give our characters any depth. Partly this is because of the time period and the conventions of the genre, but mostly it's just weak script.Ulzana's Raid is not the worst western I've seen, but it epitomizes all the things that I don't like about the genre. It's slow, formula-driven and ultimately pretty uninteresting.

SimonJack Of the many Native American nations, groups and tribes, the Apaches were among the most clever and fierce fighters. They raided with small bands among themselves and against any and all outsiders to gain goods. And they waged war in larger numbers at times with the Mexican government, U.S. Cavalry and other Indian groups. As with other American Indian groups, most movies and stories about the Apaches well into the late 20th century strayed far from the truth. Yet, history does record the almost barbaric savage behavior of some of the Apache groups in the 19th century American Southwest. "Ulzana's Raid" is a film set in the last years of the Apache Wars (1849-1886). Ulzana is the name of an Apache leader during that time, but he wasn't part of any insurrection and he died peacefully on the San Carlos reservation. So, his and other characters of this story are mostly fictitious. What this film does show is the brutality that was displayed at times by some of the Apaches, and some of the Apache culture that is considered barbaric by western culture. It also attests to the cunning, skill and strength of the Apache character in fighting and war. This is certainly one of the very best Westerns ever made that focuses on the cavalry and Indian confrontations. The acting, scenery and directing are all very good. The film gets its "R" rating from the several scenes, however short, that picture the graphic torture and mutilation of bodies. The plot is weak in places. It has some apparent lapses in story development between scenes. And the script is confusing in places, especially in the depiction of two of the characters. The first is Burt Lancaster as McIntosh. In early scenes at Fort Lowell (in present day Tucson, AZ) McIntosh describes the Apaches bitterly as ruthless barbarians out to kill and plunder. He seems clearly to hate the Indians. But, later in the film, he says he doesn't hate the Indians, but he does fear them. The second glaring incongruity of characters in the script is with Bruce Davison as Lt. Garnett DeBuin. He is only six months out of West Point and is given his first "battle" command. His father is a "man of the cloth." Early on DeBuin questions McIntosh and Apache scout Ke-Ni-Tay (played very well by Mexican actor Jorge Luke) about the Indians overall and the Apaches in particular. He is appalled at their brutality, yet he insists that the dead Apaches be buried. He wonders about White men misunderstanding and not knowing the Indians. Then, he says that he hates the Indians. At the start of the film, one senses that this young green Army officer will change his "naïve" views about the Apaches by the film's end. But the script doesn't play out that way, and instead, we have this conflicted character throughout. Toward the end, McIntosh utters a classic line after DeBuin has chastised some troopers for stabbing a dead Indian. "You don't want to think of the white man as being savage like the Apache," he says.

johnnyboyz Ulzana's Raid is war games out in the deserts of the old American West that happens to have been stretched to the length of a hundred and three minutes, a film depicting the battle between two sides vying for a territory more than it is any sort of enveloped narrative or intense character study. Imagine a team based game of Monopoly with packed groups of people on either side contesting a vaster, more open board but with the competitor's life on the line instead of large amounts of fictitious money. While we're on the subject, imagine the barren, sandy states of the American frontier as one large chess board wherein varying soldiers and troops of varying ability and rank capable only of particular things that come naturally to them move around the game zone vying for victory. While the film is essentially a series of sequences dedicated to tracking and moving and trying to work one's opponent out, veteran director Robert Aldrich just happens to have made it as gripping as it is. The respective sides in this case are, somewhat originally, the cowboys and the Indians; members of a Union Army, of whom have employed an elderly tracker who's seen one too many examples of what the Indians are capable of, and the indigenous Apaches – a group led by a notoriously savage chief whose barbarism and hatred for the whites that have settled is equal only to his love for this once pure land. Shrouded in darkness, our introduction to these Apache people paints a worryingly bleak picture as to what folk will come up against, when these horrifically scarred and robotically inclined beings raid a ranch and make off with a far more human-a looking white man's horses. The antagonist in this case is the titular Ulzana (Martinez), the man leading these people; a brutal man, not a thief or a cutthroat out of nature but out of the application of colonisation to his land, a savage man but only through war.Cut to the bright, welcoming daylight of a baseball match being played between those in the Union Army within the confines of their outpost. Things are cheerier and more upbeat, especially now that we've moved away from those 'nasty' Apaches and their night-set shenanigans. A young lieutenant named Garnett DeBuin (Davison) does well to stand up to those rougher, meaner and more ego-centric as he calls the game, in spite of his young and angelic appearance. Before anything can get too out of hand, an American scout rides in from the wilderness having been called upon as an Apache expert and someone who's lived and dealt with them in past, in spite of his reluctance to agree to their nature and views. He is McIntosh, played with a gruff aplomb by Burt Lancaster; once a young and somewhat angelic actor himself who enjoyed his time standing up to those in his profession of a more hardened nature, particularly in early films such as "The Killers". Here to deal with the threat of Ulzana, McIntosh offers a stern warning to those eventually charged with chipping in with him that Ulzana is a vicious, merciless man. Indeed, "Half of everything he says is a lie, the other half just 'aint true" is the parting shot issued by the scout on Ulzana. The body of the film is this platoon of gunmen on horseback navigating the terrain in search of Ulzana and his men. The titular Indian knows he's being tracked by this group; the army don't know where he's heading and considering just how violent Ulzana can be in his recent attacks against white settlers, there is a sense of the whole thing being one giant race against time as settlers lives remain in danger. Internal clashes between McIntosh and DeBuin see two men disagree over whether some kind of truce can be formed between the whites and the natives, McIntosh's worn dress; elderly composition and rough talking tone is manufactured to be seen as the epitome of old, politically incorrect and 'wrong' headed thinking when stood beside DeBuin's younger, fresher and more broadly minded uniformed soldier. It is unfortunate, then, that the duality inherent in these two men is eventually sidestepped for an all-out war one could accuse of being episodic, but there is enough of a grip on the audience and is never one worn out by its nature in this regard.If I was surprised by how gripping the film was, given its approach, to depict a series of tracking; talking; stopping and planning, then I was even more surprised by often how tough-a film this is. Make no mistake, the scenes involving the brutality that Ulzana inflicts upon the people of the terrain are often startling and it is indeed a sorry state of affairs when we realise just how watered down mainstream cinema has become in an era of genre hybridisation and big-business that drives American genre films of the modern day. At least in the era of Ulzana's Raid, violence and solid depictions of the old west in general could make its way into a mainstream piece because the mainstream were predominantly adult. Synonymous with the death of the Western genre (because it's tough to 'vamp up' a Western with cartoonified narrative elements and numerous sub-genres) is the death of films made by adults FOR adults, replaced by frat/fan-boy driven financial opportunists who produce cinematic stinkers in a set genre for people of similar ilk. Perhaps Ulzana's Raid is a bit episodic; perhaps it isn't much more than an exploitation film and maybe it wasn't immune to criticisms of it being mainstream upon release, but it's a sure-sight better than what we get now.

kenjha It gets off to a talky start, as it takes too long to assemble the search party to hunt down the Indians. The main battle between the troupes and the Apaches is pretty exciting. Lancaster is fine as an aging scout and so is Luke as an Indian guide. Davison, however, is rather annoying as the callow young officer, a pompous and whiny "good Christian" charged with leading the raid. His repeated questions about why the Apaches are such savages becomes so tiresome that one roots for one of the Indians to do him in. No attempt is made to portray the Indians as anything but one-dimensional savages. The violence is brutal and gratuitously repulsive.