User reviews

This is not a documentary so I can forgive the time-line inaccuracies. But it does tell a story that is based, at least in part, on a real human being, brave, intelligent, life-loving. To have suffered the loss of dignity through kidnap and slavery and then, when finally returned home, the additional heartache of the fate of not only his family but of his entire tribe, he continued to give of himself, no matter the purpose of his generosity. This movie may not teach history correctly (although it at least tries to include the people who most influenced Squanto), but it DOES teach children values... the value of treating people with dignity; the value of freedom; the value of humanity; that slavery is wrong; that war, even if necessary, is a "last resort." For teaching these things alone I recommend this movie.

In the Seventeenth Century, a group of British sailors lure the Patuxet tribe in the New World and kidnap an Indian called Squanto (Adam Beach) together with Epenow (Eric Schweig) from Nauset tribe. They are brought to England to become attraction of a circus, but Squanto succeeds to escape in a row boat that sinks. Squanto is found by monks and brought to the monastery where he learns English and white man behavior. Squanto misses his beloved wife Nakooma and when he has a chance, he returns to the New World with Epenow. But he discovers that his world is no longer the same.

"Squanto: A Warrior's Tale" is an entertaining adventure by Disney, with the full of action story of an Indian named Squanto and his adventure in England. The plot is a typical production by Disney and with no relation with historic events and the purpose is to entertain... and "Squanto: A Warrior's Tale" succeeds. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Último Grande Guerreiro" (The Last Great Warrior")

Squanto is based on real character , the Native Indian Squanto , he was a member of the Patuxet tribe best known for being an early líasion between the native populations in Southern New England and the Mayflower Pilgrims who made their settlements at the site of former summer Village. The Patuxet tribe lived on the western Coast of Cape Cod Bay where in 1614 Squanto : Adam Beach and Epenow : Eric Schweig, were abducted by Englishmen : Michael Gambon, Mark Margolis, and brought first to Spain and then England, where they lived for several years with merchants involved in a project to settle Newfoundland.Squanto eventually returned to his native Village only to find that his tribe had been wiped by Brit colonists and by an epidémic infection. In the film Squanto escapes from the mean merchants and takes shelter at a religious congregation formed by various Brothers, Paul , Timothy, James : Donnelly, Stuard Pankin, led by Brother Daniel : Mandy Patinkin.

Main starring as Adam Beach gives a nice acting as Squanto along with his pal Eric Schweig. Support cast is pretty good , such as Michael Gambon , Nathaniel Parker, Mark Margolis, Mandy Patinkin, and Irene Bedard as Squanto's wife. It displays an atmospheric and colorful cinematography by Robbie GreenBerg. Evocative and moving musical score by Joel McNeely.The motion picture was professionally directed by Xavier Koller.

The movie is a fiction but inspired by actual events , as when the Mayflower landed in 1620 Squanto worked to bróker peaceable relationships between the Pilgrims and the local natives. He played a key role in the early meetings in March 1621, partly he spoke English. He then lived with the Pilgrims for 20 months. He introduced the settlers to the fur trade and taught them how to sow and fertilize native crops. As food shortages increased Colony Governor BradFord relied on Squanto to pilot a ship of settlers on a trading expedition around Cape Cod.During that voyage, he had What BradFord called an Indian Fever. Bradford stayed with him for several days until he died which Bradford described as a great loss.Considerable mythology and legend has grown up around Squanto over time, largely because of early praises and owing to the central role that the Thanksgiving festival of 1621 plays in American folk history.He was less the Noble Savage that Later myth portrayed him and more a practical advisor and a dependable local diplomat.

I believe this is one of the best movies for this time in our country . It is so refreshing to see and hear such clear meaning of life as it is depicted in this movie . We need more of this today . It is so nice not to hear profanity and not have to see explicit displays of obscene and lewd sexual behavior in this fine movie . Hollywood is not doing it's part for America today as all they are interested is money and ratings . The public sends them a message and they give us the finger . I hope I can live long enough to see the return of desency to all forms of broadcasting . I suppose we will always have smut but it does not have to be the norm ..!! I thank you for opportunity to comment and I hope this is a positive contribution.

This movie is good but this movie is bye far not a great movie and i like this movie for two reasons and they are:

1.The main character in this movie is called Squanto and he is really great and he is played by a good actor named Adam Beach and if u liked him in this movie u should watch him in some of his other good movies like Windtalkers or Joe Dirt.

2.All of the great county side and all of the Indians in this movie are great.

Over all this movie is good and if u liked this movie u should watch the great movie called Dances With Wolves.And my rating for this movie is six out of ten.

I saw this one day under the Free Movies given to me by my cable provider. It so happened to be on the list of movies to watch for a AP summer work packet, and so I decided to watch it so I could get the blasted assignment over with. I did not know it was a Disney movie until I saw those words on the screen.

It was historically inaccurate, which was no surprise considering Disney's other works. Nevertheless, it was still enjoyable, more so if history-related movies are your thing. Watch it. Even if history-related movies aren't your thing, chances are you'll get a kick out of one of the characters, Sir George. His stick-on mole changed locations for practically every scene.

Not as wholesome or empowering as I think Disney wanted it to be, but there is at least some warmth to the message that it portrays.

It's based on the real life Squanto, though apparently takes a load of liberties with his story. I'd expect nothing less truth be told, the point of a film - in my opinion, at least - is to make a good film - therefore truth, which most of the time is more dull, takes a backseat. I'm not saying it's impossible to mix accuracy and entertainment, but I never expect both myself. Documentaries are for accuracy, after all.

Cast-wise, I can't say any of them properly stand out. Adam Beach (Squanto) and Mandy Patinkin (Daniel) would be my picks, while Michael Gambon (George) is fairly good I guess. Like most other areas of the film, it is quite average.

I didn't find 'Squanto: A Warrior's Tale' slow paced and I do appreciate the message, it's just not crafted together all that well.

This movie opens by introducing us to Squanto and his fellow tribe members . We`re shown that despite being unsophisticated and non white European they are still capable of being noble , loving and caring members of the human race . I don`t dispute that white European doesn`t always = good anymore than non white European = bad but you do get the impression that if any white Europeans turned up they`d instantly be the bad guys . True to form a ship comes sailing into the horizon

Right away the movie becomes totally anachronistic as the ship hoists the British union flag . The act of union between England and Scotland didn`t happen until 1707 while the St Patrick cross of Ireland wasn`t added to the flag until later still so considering this movie is set in 1620 it`s totally wrong . There`s other anachronistic details when the action ( Inaction more like - This is a boring movie ) tranfers to England which I won`t bore you with since you`ll be bored enough without my help . Oh and Britain was the first country to abolish slavery in the early 19th century , just thought I`d point this out since A WARRIOR`S TALE really does seem to think all the evil in the world began and ended with The British empire even if in 1620 Britain as a country didn`t exist as such

A word about the acting - It`s totally variable . Alex Norton gives a good performance as a one dimensional bad guy and OZ fans will notice Mark Margolis do a very convincing English accent . However nearly everyone else is totally wooden while Michael Gambon gives a truly ridiculous performance

Perhaps the best way to evaluate this movie`s true worth is for me to point out my local ITV network broadcast it at 1.40 am

While it is true that this story is not historically accurate, I have to say, in this case, part of the story is better than no story. It is refreshing, even for a Disney film, to see such stories brought to film for anyone to watch. It is worth the effort of watching. For myself, the story provided an introduction to the life story of Squanto.

This, in turn, raised my curiosity. This led me to look him up and learn more of his life. Again, this is a good place to begin to learn of the life of Squanto--a real person and an important person--in the course of the American Experience. What you learn following viewing this film is up to you. Disney, however, provides a good introduction to Squanto.

To any one saying that the settlers weren't devious or that natives before settlers came were savages need to learn a couple things, 1:No real attempt was made to understand Tisquantum or Native culture, particularly religion. The closest that Governor William Bradford got in analyzing him was to say "that Tisquantum sought his own ends and played his own game, ... to enrich himself". 2: The annual growing season in southern Maine and Canada was not long enough to produce maize harvests. Indian tribes in those areas were required to live a fairly nomadic existence, while the southern New England Algonquins were "sedentary cultivators" by contrast. They grew enough for their own winter needs and for trade, especially to northern tribes, and enough to relieve the colonists' distress for many years when their harvests were insufficient. Meaning basically that Bradford had to deal with the natives and undersold their involvement in settling the land and feeding the people. I kinda see where you might think the Indians were evil, keeping people alive like that...good movie and Adam Beach was excellent in his first movie.

The great Michael Gambon is totally wasted in 'The Last Great Warrior', an account of the settlement of America as one-dimensionally partisan as its title suggests. No-one is saying that the English did not do terrible things when they settled the American continent, but to suggest that the natives lived in some kind of paradisical bliss is equally absurd; moreover, the film supplements this simplification with a dangerously inaccurate implication, namely that the only good Englishmen were the ones who settled America! (bizarrely, the bad Englishmen kill all the natives with their diseases, while the Pilgrim Fathers live happily and healthily beside them). Granted, this is a children's film, but there's more depth and characterisation in an average episode of 'The Hoobs' than in this. But oddly, its flaws are no worse than those of supposedly sophisticated films like 'The Last of the Mohicans'. Smug liberalism may be preferable to the racist superiority of the John Wayne era; but how sadly rare it is to see a "Western" (to which genre this film essentially belongs, in spite of its east coast setting) that goes beyond a game of goodies and baddies. 'The Last Great Warrior' most certainly does not.

As a history buff and a published writer in that subject, I was distressed to see how the film's storyline warped the real history of Squanto, especially in how he was treated by his English hosts, which was mostly cordial by all accounts, during the many years he actually lived on the other side of the Pond (and should have gotten Frequent Sailor Miles for all those trips he made back and forth over the Atlantic.) But it does show he learned the lessons of the Christian virtues taught him by the Franciscan monks and others who befriended him during that time, and more important, he passed them on to his Indian brethren so that they might live in harmony with their new neighbors. Like two other films that were released about this same time, DANCES WITH WOLVES and LAST OF THE MOHICANS, it shows that people of differing cultures can work together to accomplish great things, even in the face of great hostility between the two sides by those not so enlightened. At the screening of this film last night at the Lidgerwood Presbyterian Church, we watched this tale unfold and found it to be a great way of remembering why we celebrate Thanksgiving in the U.S.A. History teaches us (or it did when most of us in the church's audience went to school)that Squanto played a huge part in ensuring the Pilgrims could grow enough food and hunt and fish well enough to survive the coming winter, a task he did so well that it enabled the Pilgrims and their Indian neighbors to partake in a feast that continues as a tradition in America almost four centuries later. But this film carries a message beyond our traditional rationale for having a uniquely American holiday set apart to give thanks to God for providing bounty and blessings to all Americans in this land.That mostly overlooked message that many of us don't see today but that Squanto recognized is that peace and brotherhood and charity must be practiced if we are to survive and prosper in this world.

In a year (1994) when the Disney Studios released so many entertaining films (IRON WILL, THE LION KING, THE JUNGLE BOOK, THE SANTA CLAUSE, ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD, D2-MIGHTY DUCKS,) this stood out as a real gem of a movie that still entertains and inspires us today. I think Walt Disney would have been proud to have put his name on such a fine production by the motion picture company bearing his name. Thanks be to Walt, thanks be to Squanto and thanks, most of all, to God. Happy Thanksgiving. Dale Roloff

Released in 1994, "Squanto: A Warrior's Tale" chronicles the life of Squanto (Adam Beach), who was taken captive in 1605 and taken to Europe where he's rescued by some monks, learns English, and embraces Christianity. When he returns to his native land years later in modern-day Massachusetts he is devastated at what he finds, but he helps the newly arrived Pilgrims in 1621, which makes way for the first Thanksgiving meal.

While everything stated above is true, the actual story is severely truncated for the movie, which they HAD to do or it'd be a 4-hour movie. In reality Tisquantum, aka Squanto, was captured and taken to Europe no less than three times between 1605-1619.The first and third times he was taken to England while the second time to Spain. He found sanctuary in the monastery during his second kidnapping to Spain. Also, he largely learned English during his first enslavement in England so he could teach ship captains his Native American language and to help in a later expedition to guide, interpret and map the New England coast. This first excursion to England lasted 9 years. His second excursion to Europe lasted approximately 3 years and the his third one a matter of months.

So, while the gist of the story is true, the details are quite different. The movie also throws in some highly unlikely episodes, like a fight with a brown bear in an arena in England and a Puritan/Native confrontation at the Plymouth settlement. As far as the first goes, there's simply no record that any Native Americans fought for their lives in arenas in Europe, which isn't to say that something LIKE it never happened. In regards to the second, while the people of the Mayflower were rejected by some Natives (who shot arrows at them) they got along with the Wampanoags near the Plymouth settlement and signed a peace treaty that lasted fifty years.

If you can ignore the dubious factors, "Squanto: A Warrior's Tale" is an enjoyable movie. It could've even been great, like 1992's "The Last of the Mohicans," but it's hindered by Disney-fication. Yes, this is a Walt Disney production. I was never a fan of Disney flicks, even as a tyke. I always preferred the un-sanitized real deal and couldn't stand the obviously artificial "family friendly" approach of Disney productions. That said, Disney does a pretty believable job with "Squanto." It's great to get a glimpse of what it was like during that era, but it unfortunately supports the myth that North America was a veritable Garden of Eden before Europeans came, which wasn't true in the least. The numerous Native tribes were in conflict all over the continent and they regularly practiced torture tactics on captive Natives. See the excellent "Black Robe" (1991) for the brutal truth. There's one lame scene where Epenow (Eric Schweig) informs Squanto that he learned how to lie from the white man. Yeah, like Natives didn't know what a lie was before Europeans came (rolling my eyes). To its credit, the movie shows both the good and bad sides of the Europeans and shows that Squanto embraced the virtues of Christianity.

The film runs 102 minutes and was shot in Louisbourg Harbour, Louisbourg, Nova Scotia.

GRADE: C+ or B- (5.5/10)

I believe this is one of the best movies for this time in our country . It is so refreshing to see and hear such clear meaning of life as it is depicted in this movie . We need more of this today . It is so nice not to hear profanity and not have to see explicit displays of obscene and lewd sexual behavior in this fine movie . Hollywood is not doing it's part for America today as all they are interested is money and ratings . The public sends them a message and they give us the finger . I hope I can live long enough to see the return of decency to all forms of broadcasting . I suppose we will always have smut but it does not have to be the norm ..!! I thank you for opportunity to comment and I hope this is a positive contribution.

Although this film wasn't historically accurate as it seemed, I have to admit there was an honest attempt to making it historically correct. For a Walt Disney movie, there were some aspects to the film that tried to let the audience know that there was at least some truth to Squanto's story. However, I really think that this film would have been a lot better off if they made it in documentary fashion rather than making as a children's film. I really don't think children themselves care too much about Squanto and what he meant to the Pawtuxet people. If a child wants to see a Walt Disney movie, I think they would be more interested in watching Peter Pan, or Winnie the Pooh or Cinderella, etc, NOT a story about an actual Native person who lived a proud legacy for his people.

But ............. anyways......... that's why I gave this film a 4 out of 10.

personally, i think this was a great movie. i just finished watching it and loved it. some say that it was inaccurate, but give me one example how it was. Squanto's tribe was killed by disease, he was kidnapped by the English, and he showed the Pilgrims how to plant and farm. sure, he may not have stopped a "war" between the Pilgrims and his friend's tribe (who is played by a favorite actor of mine and a very hot guy) but otherwise the rest of the movie is fairly accurate. sure, i was sad when Squanto had been so hopeful to come back to his bride and when he gets back he finds out she's gone, but sometimes you gotta survive. i'm part Indian and i know all about surviving and just barely getting thru life. death and loss is a fact of life.

What a boat load of bunk.

If you're looking for a slice of history at Thanksgiving, look elsewhere because Squanto's Warrior Tale is so far off the mark, it's laughable.

For those of us who have done much reading on the subject, it becomes obvious early on that this movie is about as credible and accurate as something from Oliver Stone.

This movie is so far beyond artistic license, it's ridiculous.

Save your time and don't confuse your kid with this tripe. The Peanuts version of the Mayflower crossing and First Thanksgiving is far more accurate.

Honestly, when the Indian gets shot by the Puritan in the end at the stand off, they should have just given that dude an MRI or something. Like let's be real, airship that boy to the hospital, and fix his wound. Give him so morphine and some antibiotics, that boy would be all good to go. 1/10 on realness of the movie. I mean come on, let's be real again, there was no native speaking of the Indians, they were speaking English. I was not immersed at all in this experience. The only thing I was glad about was that that monk did not snitch when the King James(not Lebron from the Cavs). If that dude would have snitched then I so would have been annoyed. I mean Squanto was a G, was he not? All I am saying is that Squanto was such a pimp, and all these dudes are out to get him.