Before the Fall

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 1999)

Wars have always dominated the history of the human species, from its early beginnings in the Stone Age up to the days of our modern civilization. An immensity of blood was spilt on the most various justifications, to extend one's own territory, for the sake of possession or maybe out of no apparent reason at all. These vile habits continued throughout the ages; they were backed by policies of bold expansionism like the ones of the Roman Empire or Colonialism, to name but a few. In our century the incessant waves of arms and armours still have not stopped breaking on the shores of mankind; wars and warriors are not exterminated yet. Only the weapons have changed: where first there were some scattered tribes who fought ferociously against each other using rather rudimentary equipment such as roughly cut bones or stones, there are now modern means of warfare, more powerful than ever, with a capability of destruction hardly to be surpassed.
The film I want to comment on, "Ran" by Akira Kurosawa, reflects all this, the unceasing and senseless carnage of millions of people, man's fury of self-annihilation. The last scene in particular deserves attention: You can see Tsurumaru, a young blind-man, one who has suffered many atrocities, who has traversed the infernos of war and has become its only survivor, stumble along a mountain ridge towards the edge, alone, in front of a wide and open sky, impressively reddened by the sun's setting.
And the spectator, still deeply touched by the violent scenes seen before, the bloodshed, the ever-present hunger for power and possession, draws his pessimistic conclusion: this is the dusk of human history; man, who did nothing to stop the move into the fatal direction, who, in his folly, even invented nuclear weapons to hasten his own destruction, is a stumbling blind-man, about to fall into a deep and sombre abyss.