One of the very best "train wreck" movies ever

Rating: 9/10 (16 September 2001)

RAN is a classic film and a classic example of what I like to call "train wreck" movies. In a "train wreck" film, the situation is obviously headed straight into disaster and the audience wants to scream to the characters to get off the tracks (whatever happens to serve as the metaphorical tracks in their situations) and prevent a catastrophe. A "train wreck" film is not like Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot example, where the film would be over and all problems solved if everyone involved wasn't an idiot. The characters in RAN are not idiots. They make bad decisions, and decisions that seemed good but are subverted and manipulated by malicious men and women, and when things go to hell they do become crazed and non-lucid. But the Lord had good intentions, forgetting what sort of travel route good intentions are used to construct.
RAN understands also that film characters, like most real human beings, are a mix of good and evil. The three sons make bad decisions and end up destroying each other, but they also realize how horrible their actions are and regret them (only not enough to stop the train wreck from happening). Lady Kaede is as close to 100% evil as I've seen at the movies, yet even she is acting not as a stereotypical harridan, but as a subtle manipulator whose avenue for creating destruction is opened up by other forces. Metaphors could be drawn from RAN to a lot of modern-day situations where different factions battle for a lot of reasons, and paramount among them is the inability to see a word where they're NOT battling.
The combat scenes in this movie are stunning, and have been well-described elsewhere; suffice it to say that BRAVEHEART and GLADIATOR owe their Best Picture Oscars to the choreography of costuming, editing, cinematography, and fake blood (lots of it) here, to say nothing of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. RAN is an incredible film, and it's not always fun to watch, but it's unforgettable in its poetry of a great family reduced to savagery.