Kevin Costner and Easter Island?!

The Easter Island mystery is so intriguing, that a film has been made about it. Produced by Kevin Costner, the film ‘Rapa Nui’ tells the story of civil war between the ‘short eared’ and ‘long eared’ tribes on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the fight between two opposing leaders of these tribes for the love and affection of one girl. In terms of geography and anthropology, you do have to take this film with a pinch of salt, as factually it is most certainly not perfect! I may be in danger here of turning into a movie critic, but by investigating the parts of this film that are factually inaccurate, we can actually highlight and learn some things about Easter Island.

For example, this film is set 300 years ago (around AD 1700), and tells how there is civil war between tribes on the Island. The tribes are still erecting statues, however, it is impossible for these tribes to be erecting the moai when they are at war. As has been highlighted in a previous post, resources were scattered around the island, with stones for the moai in the, quarries for the red stones that formed hats for the moai, fishing in the, agriculture in the, and forests in the. This suggests not only a complex and highly organised society on Easter Island, it also suggests that friendly trade between tribes that congregated round the resources must have been in place for the statues to have been built. Thus statue building and civil war could not have coincided. Basically the film seems to have mixed two eras into one!

Secondly, the film assumes that the islanders cut down the palm trees for space for the moai. Although this could have been possible, it is much more likely that the trees were cut down, if they were cut down at all, to provide resources and to make space for agriculture rather than the statues.

The film advocates the popularised view shared by Jared Diamond that Easter Island collapsed due to the ‘ecocide’ theory. The influence of both the film and Diamond’s books are dangerous for Easter Island as causes people to form a preconceived view on why Easter collapsed, without looking at the different theories of collapse.