I’m sure they didn’t put the Pawnee in the movie to balance it, they put them in so the good guys would have someone to fight.

Unless there’s something I don’t remember correctly, Costner doesn’t save them because he’s smarter or braver than them, he saves them because he has boxes of repeating rifles buried at his outpost. That was never a part of the movie that bothered me. Although the army couldn’t afford to buy newly developed repeating rifles for Civil War infantry even though Lincoln wanted to, so I’m sure that some outpost in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t have had a crate of them. But those kinds of inaccuracies are pretty consistently present in Westerns, and they don’t bother me.

I love A Perfect World and think that Costner is fantastic in it. He wouldn’t have made that on his own though, it’s Eastwood’s movie and Eastwood’s version of Costner.