perhaps the most visually stylistic in the plethora of films by the greatest Japanese director and one heck of a motion picture

Rating: 10/10 (9 April 2010)

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was one of the true masters of the cinema. It was he and people like him that proved to the audience that film-making is not merely a gallimaufry of the various forms of entertainment, but art. Film-making is art inside as well as out. And Kurosawa's dark and brilliant 1980 film "Kagemusha" qualifies without fault. Though the art is more apparent on the outside, there is plenty of it inside as well.
"Kagemusha" translates in English as "Shadow Warrior": the alias given to the unnamed protagonist of the film. The "Kagemusha" is a condemned bandit who is saved from the gallows when the brother of daimyo Takeda Shingen discovers that he bears a striking resemblance to the bloodthirsty dictator. The bandit is promised freedom if he impersonates the war-mongering lord for three years in order to confuse his enemies. However, when the real Shingen is shot and killed by a sharpshooter, the Kagemusha is forced to take all responsibilities of the lifestyle of the lord such as commanding his armies, outwitting his enemies, and serving as a father-figure to his grandson.
The Kagemusha is played by veteran actor Tatsuya Nakadai, whom fought against Toshiro Mifune in both "Yojimbo" and "Sanjuro" and would later work on Akira Kurosawa's highly acclaimed 1985 film "Ran." He also plays the real Takeda Shinge in the opening portion of the film and Nakadai is utterly brilliant in the way he switches between both roles even though these two men are, in a way, identical. It's the way Nakadai acts that we can sense a character difference between the two. An enormous deal of credit is also due to the writers (one of whom is director Kurosawa) who made the brilliant decision of never revealing the actual name of the Kagemusha. And strangely enough, because the writing is so good and Nakadai's acting is so pure, though we don't know the man's name, we can identify and sympathize with him, which is exactly what we do in the last third of the movie. The most brilliant element of the film's human level is the way Nakadai bonds with the grandson of the man whom he is impersonating and the way he discovers that he is not only a better father figure, but a better person, than the actual ruler.
Regardless of your opinion on the movie, there is one thing everybody agrees on: there is beauty painted all over the screen. There's not a badly-lit or badly-composed frame in the entire film. We get a surreal, array-flooded nightmare sequence, gorgeous landscape shots, majestic views of the ocean, and much more. Kurosawa always storyboarded his films using painting as opposed to sketches and here he just let loose an array of passion and colors that undoubtedly mirror what he did while trying to sell the story to distributors. Like he would do with "Ran", although not quite to the same extent, Kurosawa graphically re-enacts violence with an artistic, but harrowing nature that is completely foreign to the glorified, stimulating duels of "Yojimbo." Blood is let loose in torrents throughout the film, but Kurosawa does not overdo it to the point where it might condescend into some kind of an unintentional comedy. The climax of the movie, a recreation of the 1575 Battle of Nagashino brilliantly generates a reaction from the audience and the famous four-minute montage of death and suffering that follows is truly gripping. Like the final showdown of Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" very little happens and this may sound like a premise for an overdrawn sequence, but every second of it is overwhelmingly strong. Perhaps the reason why Akira Kurosawa had such a difficult time getting backers was because he wanted absolute control over his films. Well, he hardly got support and in this case he needed financial assistance from Western admirers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, but when he did have the money and the control, Kurosawa was relentlessly brilliant.
The running time of "Kagemusha" will question the full extent of its audience as will the scenes where very little happens for a while, but for those who appreciate a good movie and have three hours to spare, this is a tremendously enthralling experience. "Kagemusha" boasts a lot of exterior display, but unlike a great many other movies that have the same accolade of looking good, Kurosawa's movie shows beauty beneath as well, on the human level, encompassing the audience with a heck of a story. It had me drawn in right from the very beginning. This is the definition of a motion picture.
Footnote: keep an eye out in the film for Takashi Shimura, one of Kurosawa's veterans ("Seven Samura", "Ikiru", "Yojimbo", etc.) in one of his last performances.