Junto Boys

THE LAST SAMURAI (A Movie Review)

Of all the Studio releases this Christmas, THE LAST SAMURAI was the most anticipated by me. I have visited and revisited in some cases, the famous Kurosawa samurai films from the 1950s and 1960s through Netflix this year. That even led me to watch Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy starring Kurosawa’s leading man Toshiro Mifune. I liked them all and my imagination has gotten caught up in this part of Japanese culture.

I don’t know how accurate Kurosawa’s films were as critics in his own country felt that he was too “American” in outlook. Kurosawa always shot back that they were jealous that his films were seen and enjoyed by a wider audience than other Japanese filmmakers. He said the critics decided his popularity made him somehow inauthentic. I don’t know what an authentic Japanese film is supposed to be like, but Kurosawa films are very compelling and he does for Samurai films what John Ford did for the western.


In the latest Edward Zwick/ Tom Cruise film, western and eastern ideas are brought together. Cruise plays an ex Civil War soldier who is now full of drink and falling apart due to the horrors of killing innocent Indians on the frontier. The Japanese government hires him to train an army to fight the rebellious Samurai whose way of life is coming to an end with modernization.

Cruise is soon captured by the Samurai and soon goes native. This acts as a redemption of sorts. He joins one group of noble savages to make up for his defeat of the other. The parallel is a stretch because American Indians hadn’t invented the wheel when we came to the New World, where as the Japanese Samurai were at the heart of a very regimented and disciplined system that rivaled the Knights code in European at the same time. To make up for the shaky comparison, Cruise has to continually face nightmares of the Indian slaughter so that we can see his redemption with the Samurai.

The end of the Samurai is tragic in the way Don Quixote is comic. The Man from La Mancha yearns for an earlier chivalrous time when men would quietly go to their fateful death for the system of honor. These noble ideas were slow to die in even Europe and such blind gallantry was mostly responsible for the ugliness of World War I. America, at this time, was ahead of curve in modernizing and is saved us some grief.

The ancient Samurai worked in a closed system where everyone respected the history. Japan had to enter the modern world in order to compete with those nations who wouldn’t respect their rules of warfare. This idea never gets through in the picture. Even worse is that America is blamed for the modernization of Japan and by inference is, I supposed, responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

I went to see a film about the noble Samurai and their fight to remain viable, but instead I got another criticism of America. The samurai plot is just a backdrop for Tom Cruise to reject the failings of his own country. I no longer expect a Hollywood film about America to be supportive of America. It’s just that the plot device is so hackneyed that you’d think that critics would be getting tired of it too.

That this version of anti-Americanism has to be set in Japan is, I suppose, a fresh take on hating our country’s history. But why not make Cruise’s struggles personal instead of political. Just seeing Tom Cruise willingly and happily killing Indians would have made his transformation later more poignant than making him another victim of the system.

It’s a very easy thing to criticize one’s country for not always following the modern view of things, especially when the modern view of things is constantly changing. What’s difficult is allowing the past a fair say in what we might consider barbaric or outdated. Too many movies serve the purpose of preaching from lofty heights instead of giving the characters real human challenges. It’s another reason why independent films are more interesting. Independent films don’t always ask the expected questions and give you the easy answers.

As pure entertainment, the movie still worked until the big showdown that rang so hollow it used up what capital it had earned. It’s a shame because Ken Watanabee was great as the Last Samurai and the supporting characters were equally good. Tom Cruise suffers from having such a modern face, but he could have made it work with a more nuanced script.