Bear with me here, but I’m going to take a moment. Before I talk about how Dances With Wolves holds up 25 years after it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, I’m going to talk about Grease.

Grease is a movie that is supposed to be about the ’50s. It’s a period piece, really, meant to evoke a specific time in our pop culture history. The problem with Grease is that it is so cheesy, so hokey, so much of the era in which it was actually made (as opposed to the era it is attempting to evoke), that, watching it now, it is not evocative of the ’50s. It is evocative of the ’70s. It is about the ’50s the way that Transformers is about advanced robotics.

Watching Dances With Wolves recently invoked similar impressions. The movie, of course, takes place during the Civil War, but every frame of the film screams early ’90s. This is as much a relic of its time as Milli Vanilli, “2 Legit 2 Quit,” and Operation Desert Storm. The movie means to be a capsule of a specific time in American history, but it ends up being about a specific time in Hollywood—a time that seems just as far away.

There are ’90s touchstones everywhere, starting with the opening credits, which show us Orion Pictures, the acclaimed studio that soon thereafter went bankrupt. There are mullets everywhere, even on Union soldiers who more likely would have been a little less Party In The Back. The movie casts Robert Pastorelli, a “breakout” sitcom star from Murphy Brown, in a “wacky” comedic role. (No offense to the late Pastorelli, who died of a morphine overdose in 2004, but there may be no more ’90s actor than him, with the possible exception of his Murphy Brown co-star Grant Shaud.) And it has the most ’90s artifact of all, Kevin Costner, back when he was the most assured, stable movie star in the world, the next coming of Jimmy Stewart, a guy who could headline both Oliver Stone paranoid nihilist thrillers and two-hankie Whitney Houston romances and not even break a sweat. The movie even lets him try an accent out a couple of times, which is as much a ’90s staple as a Dan Quayle gaffe.

But more than anything, Dances With Wolves feels like a ’90s movie because that was the last time a big Hollywood studio would ever bankroll a movie like this. This was a big huge expansive ambitious insane project, with Kevin Costner and no one else anybody knew starring in a three-hour (three hours!) tale of a soldier’s personal journey. It was also directed by the star, who is particularly fond of giving himself lingering close-ups. (Costner loves close-ups of his own face the way Ben Affleck loves shots of himself shirtless and working out before cutting to a shot of a helicopter flying over downtown Boston.)