my review: The Last Samurai

It's a good movie but it's not great. It's about as good as Braveheart: a
decent Hollywood epic.

Kensaku Watanabe and Hiroyuki Sanada (English speakers know him from Japan's
Ringu) both create very memorable characters and I almost wanted the story to
be about them rather than Cruise. While I liked Cruise's performance in the
movie, I wanted more. In the beginning, he's an alcoholic, a racist, and an
opportunistic killer. By the end, he's sober, tolerant of the Japanese, and a
more efficent killer. That's about it, and I guess I was expecting something a
little more complex. It's Dances With Wolves except with Samurai warriors. 

Screenwriter John Logan said in interviews that the movie was about Cruise's
character changing after interaction with Eastern culture. While that does
happen, I thought more about how the modernization of Japan's army would
inevitably doom the Shogunate. There are some scenes that I thought were
unrealistic, for instance one where a single archer is able to pick off dozens
of men armed with rifles before being shot down. And I was a little skeptical
when the movie wanted me to root for the men armed only with arrows and katana
swords when they're up against soldiers with Howitzers. It sounds pessimistic,
but the Samurai never really stood a chance.

The final battle is certainly well crafted though. The director is Edward
Zwick, who made Glory, and he was obviously inspired by the battle in
Kurosawa's Ran. That's another thing: the war sequences in the movie are pretty
raw and violent, like Braveheart or Gladiator, and yet many audiences hate
Verhoeven films or things like Kill Bill. I'm beginning to think that
"high-brow" middle-aged theater-goers really do have a thirst for bloodshed and
violence at the movies just as much as the supposedly "depraved" audiences they
decry --but they'll hide behind traditional, "ennobled" storytelling. That is,
they say they enjoy it, but only if it's "historically justified" violence,
which is nonsense.

The movie isn't bad but it could've been better.