Does ‘Rapa Nui’ Take Artistic License Too Far? : Movies: Some experts fear Hollywood’s depiction of historical events will merely distort facts. Kevin Costner’s film about Easter Island is set to open Sept. 9.

Hollywood has well-known ways of teasing reality into movie magic, winking at factual accuracy. In a new film about Easter Island, that imaginative tradition meshes with a pattern of myth and fantasy already overshadowing the blurry past of this remote Pacific outpost.

Some archeologists, trying to piece together an accurate picture of the island’s cultural heritage, are unhappy over what Hollywood has done. More distortion, especially in a slick and sensational motion picture, tramples on the all-too-fragile truth of Easter Island, they complain.

The movie in question is “Rapa Nui,” co-produced by Kevin Costner and Barrie Osborne and to be released by Warner Bros. on Sept. 9. It was directed by Kevin Reynolds and stars Sandrine Holt, Jason Scott Lee and Esai Morales.

Rapa Nui is the native name for Easter Island, a Chilean possession on the far-flung southeastern edge of Polynesia. In broad terms, the movie tells a story of love and war in a society that flourished here during a past era of glory, then collapsed in violent upheaval in the 17th Century, before Europeans discovered the isolated island.

There are scenes showing some of Easter Island’s famous statues of volcanic stone, huge monoliths with elongated faces, proudly jutting chins and truncated torsos. There are sweeping vistas of the island’s grassy hills and meadows, its wave-battered coast. And there are crowds of Rapa Nui natives, hired by the movie makers to appear in the film wearing scanty costumes that someone has imagined early inhabitants wore.

The screenplay of “Rapa Nui” revolves around forbidden love between a young man and woman belonging to rival tribes, known in Rapa Nui legend as the “Long Ears” and the “Short Ears.” The two tribes fight a final, bloody battle near the end of the movie at a place called “Poike Ditch.”

The battle of Poike Ditch is part of Rapa Nui legend, but much of the island lore has been invented or twisted over the centuries by imaginative storytellers, researchers say. While it is true that some people in Rapa Nui wore ornamental plugs that distended their earlobes, archeological study has made it clear that those “long ears” were not the mark of a separate tribe but rather were found throughout the island, perhaps as an indicator of social or political rank.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Norwegian author Thor Heyerdahl popularized a notion that the Long Ears were descendants of invaders from the South American Andes who came to Rapa Nui and established a superior culture that was responsible for great architectural works and the island’s great monolithic statues, called moais. The Short Ears were said to be of Polynesian descent, with a lesser cultural heritage.

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Such theories, which have been discredited by numerous archeological studies, are often criticized for making it seem that the richness of Rapa Nui’s ancestral culture was an import from South America rather than the fruit of the island’s real Polynesian roots. It has taken years to filter out contamination of the truth and of Rapa Nui’s pride in an authentically Polynesian cultural identity, some anthropologists and archeologists say.

And now, Hollywood’s movie threatens to muddy the waters again, says Jo Anne Van Tilburg, a research associate at UCLA’s Institute of Archeology.

“At this vulnerable juncture in their history, the islanders are again grappling with fictional tales about their past, this time created by Hollywood,” Van Tilburg wrote last year in the U.S. magazine Archeology. In a guest column, she pointed out flaws in the “Long Ears” versus “Short Ears” legend, and she questioned whether the great battle at the end of the movie has any veracity.

“Excavations by the University of Chile of the so-called Poike Ditch have failed to come up with the charcoal and bone to prove that such a legendary battle actually took place,” she wrote.

Jose Miguel Ramirez, an archeologist who manages the 16,000-acre national park on Easter Island, takes Van Tilburg’s side against the movie’s content, which he calls “a disaster.”

He said “Rapa Nui” mixes elements from different periods of the past as if they belonged in the same time and introduces “elements that have nothing to do with the island’s culture,” such as clothing styles and native Maoris from New Zealand.

“Like Hollywood movies about North American Indians, it is going to establish a version of history that is false,” Ramirez said in an interview. “Unfortunately, what it is going to do is establish a caricature around the world of what the Rapa Nui culture was.”

Lilian Gonzalez, an anthropologist with the University of Chile’s Institute for Easter Island Studies, does not deny the distortions in the movie, but she does argue that it has redeeming value.

For example, Gonzalez said, it can serve as a dramatic warning against the kind of ecological destruction that took place on Rapa Nui, where archeologists say native forests were razed and soils depleted, possibly contributing to hunger and turmoil. “What is interesting is the realization of what happened and what can happen in the world,” she said.

“Anyone who sees the movie is going to disagree with many things,” she added. “But it is a movie, not a historical document.”

During several months of shooting on Easter Island last year, the movie makers used hundreds of natives as extras. Gonzalez said the experience reinforced their appreciation of their heritage, including traditional handicrafts and methods for preparing food that have all but faded away.

“They sensed the value of their culture, and their own value,” the anthropologist said. “That was a vaccination of identity, an injection of community spirit.”

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Claudio Cristino, an archeologist with the Institute for Easter Island Studies, was employed by the movie company as a consultant. Apparently, however, the movie makers either didn’t consult Cristino or didn’t heed his advice on some things. The dialogue, for example: “What they say and don’t say, seemed pretty bad to me, not typical of Polynesia, very Hollywood,” Cristino said.

“Obviously, from the first moment, I realized that this was fiction,” he said. “It compresses 500 or 600 years into one hour and a half. But you have to admit that it is a fiction based on some things that probably did happen.”

A village set, intended to replicate an early community, was archeologically “pretty good,” according to Cristino. So was the clothing shown, he said, adding, “Of course, some license was taken.”

Before the movie company came, many islanders criticized plans for the filming, warning of possible damage to archeological sites and disruption of the society. But Cristino and others now say that very little harm was done.

Two statues were scratched, Cristino said, but “it is no more damage than what is done by 5,000 tourists a year.”

He and others predict that the movie will be a boon to tourism, Easter Island’s main source of livelihood. “From what we’ve seen, it won’t be a great movie,” he said, but “elements such as the photography of scenery, the people and a vision of how this was in the past--that will be interesting.”

The filming last year brought a minor bonanza in itself, said anthropologist Gonzalez. “It was an injection of money for Easter Island,” she said. “Many people were able to finish their houses or their hotels, buy a vehicle,” she said.

Ramirez, the park manager, said the movie company contracted three islanders for a total of nearly $120,000 to take care of cleanup work after the shooting and donated $70,000 to the cash-strapped park.

Besides money, the movie gave Easter Island plenty of fodder for its gossip mill. Five or six island women reportedly married movie crew members and left the island with them, and several other women left but later returned.

Australians in the crew are said to have encouraged two pay strikes by Easter Island extras. The Americans paid up and the shooting continued.

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When the shooting was over, the Maori actors from New Zealand were leaving one night on a commercial flight to Tahiti. As the story is told now, they had been partying enthusiastically and one or more of them was late for the plane, which was about to leave. To keep it from taking off without them, 10 or 15 of the actors occupied the airport apron in front of the plane.

Co-producer Osborne was there, and Chilean authorities blamed him for the incident. The Interior Ministry ordered his expulsion from the country, prohibiting his return.

But Jacobo Hei, the native governor of Easter Island, said he hoped to persuade authorities to allow Osborne to come back. According to Hei, a grand premiere for “Rapa Nui” on Easter Island in late September was being planned with the presence of Osborne and a charter planeload of other people from Hollywood.

“I’m interested in that man coming and showing the movie,” Hei said. “I think he will be able to get in without problems.”