Colorful Asian warfare without ninjas-on-wire trickery

Rating: 9/10 (19 July 2009)

Unlike director Ang Lee's 2000 film CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, or director Yimou Zhang's American wide releases earlier this century (HERO in 2002, HOUSE OF THE FLYING DAGGERS in 2004, and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER in 2006), viewers of Akira Kurosawa's 1985 epic RAN not only are treated to period warfare much more colorful than equivalent movies in European settings, but also get a sense of realism (as in, these things actually could have happened on planet Earth) missing from the four more recent Asian martial dramas.
Since it was not Kurosawa's original intention to remake KING LEAR, and since only a few of the touches (such as youngest son Saburo's shading of his "sleeping" father's form in the opening scene, or the presence of Kyoami, a European-style court jester) are distinct "borrowings" from Shakespeare's play, film fans with an antipathy toward the bard should not be put off by RAN being listed as an "adaptation" of LEAR.
Finally, if I were to compare a character from RAN with one from Shakespeare's opus, I would tend toward noting the similarity between the amoral ambitions of Lady Macbeth in the tragedy named for her hen-pecked husband to RAN's Lady Kaede (a brilliant Mieko Harada), who earns the fate of Macbeth himself with her no-holds-barred unquenchable thirst for revenge.