In translating Cooper’s work for the screen, [film-makers] highlight and make popular those elements of The Last of the Mohicans that have little to do with Cooper’s original story, but have everything to do with twentieth-century American popular culture and taste. While most of the directors do a sterling job of targeting Cooper’s mise en scene, none of their film versions of the novel accurately reproduce Cooper’s plot, and few come close to understanding Cooper’s theme. Despite these problems, film versions continue to be made because Hollywood sees the novel containing the ingredients of an American film classic, if for all the wrong reasons . . .
When Michael Mann produced his 1992 film, the Hawk-eye and Cora love affair took center stage. In choosing to pair Hawk-eye with the dark-haired Cora and Uncas with the fair-haired Alice Mann revised Cooper's original story which showed Hawkeye as a "man without a cross" (and without a girlfriend) and Uncas drawn to Cora, a dark-haired mulatto, rather than to the blonde Alice, a coupling representing Cooper's own attitudes toward miscegenation.
Of all the many revisions of Cooper's novel that appear in the 1992 version, Mann's decision to turn The Last of the Mohicans primarily into a love story and to ignore the essence of the Native-American theme is the strangest and most damaging plot twist of all.
It is one thing to borrow scenes from other Leather-Stocking novels (the canoe chase from The Pathfinder, for example); to invent scenes (Hawk-eye's shooting of Duncan Heyward to prevent his suffering at the burning stake, Magua's killing of Colonel Munro); or to mismatch lovers (Duncan and Cora rather than Duncan and Alice, Uncas and Alice rather than Uncas and Cora) to sell theater tickets.
But to manipulate the story's plot in an attempt to make history more vivid and realistic for the contemporary filmgoer is questionable directing and screenwriting. To focus on the love affair between American literature's most strongly individualistic, anti-authoritarian, and anti-British mythic hero and Cora Munro is to miss the essential theme and flavor of Cooper's classic tale.
. . . The Last of the Mohicans is not finally about such peripheral action as two lovers (particularly white ones), but about the "unremitting, frequently violent, always exasperating contest between the Native Americans and the intruders, white immigrants and settlers of every description" (xxx) and its consequences: the destruction of the last vestiges of a race of Native-Americans.