A Hollow, Confused Vanilla Epic

Rating: 3/10 (26 January 2004)

Why did they bother? What a shallow, confused, obvious and ultimately chaotic mess.
I love samurai films. I have a love of Japan and a love of Japanese films. I can watch even a bad Japanese film because the minute of the Japanese environment can captivate and engross. Yet the Last Samurai is so stripped of meaning, detail or subtlety that I came away wondering why they bothered.
The Last Samurai runs an epic, humourless two and a half hours. it seemed much longer.
The Meiji Restoration is a fascinating period of Japanese history. The Last Samurai examines it with all a finese and insight that can only come of producing it entirely in New Zealand. Japan looks a lot like Middle Earth. Come to think of it, the badlands of Little Big Horn look a lot like Middle Earth. No amount of blue tinting can disguise this basic, unsettling visual impairment. In the first battle sequence, you are expecting bands of orcs to come grunting out of the forest. Instead, you get samurai in *medieval* armour. Welcome to 1876.
Confused? Don't worry, you're not alone.
In The Last Samurai, for all its bushido posturing, Japan and the Japanese are a mere afterthought.
They got the US flag wrong too. And San Francisco. Given this, you don't have much confidence in their treatment of the history and politics of the period, or the intricacies and beauty of Japanese culture. Luckily, there's almost none. It mighty as well be Arrakis as Japan. The Last Samurai is a fantasy.
This is a nothing so much as boys own adventure, and brings the very best and worst of the genre. There are few women, in fact only one who counts, and she is...uh huh got it in one. Tom Cruise is Nathan Algren the curiously centreless, ammoral hero, a character without subtlety, who of course out-samurais the samurai in just a few months. Whitie wins again.
Cruise can bring little of the necessary gravitas to the role, little to make Nathan anything more than a action figure who can talk and bend.
The next paragraphs contain spoilers, an odd term in this context because there is very very little in the plotting to surprise.
American comes to Japan to fight rebel samurai. American is captured. American lives with samurai. You can guess the rest. Everything is perfectly two dimensional - noble rebels, complete with rebel leader who is really uh huh, grudging tough guy warrior who uh huh, and beautiful widow who uh huh. Its join the dots fantasy, rarely rising above stereotype... weak Emperor, two faced politicians, amoral Europeans. There's the obligatory 'use the force, Luke' scene, a few token culture clash scenes, and of course, the meat of the movie, lots of noble, chop-suey style battle scenes. Well choreographed, drawn out and messy, they are the heart of the film, and the measure of its appeal or lack thereof. The bushido way is death before dishonour, but heck, there's always a hollywood exception, right?
The entire effort is curiously humourless, even given the serious themes and supposed dramatic depth of Cruise's character. The film has one good joke, completely out of genre, that takes us into Kevin Smith territory. (What was the name Ethan gave to his minder?)
Billy Connolly makes an all-too-brief appearance as Nathan's loyal NCO. As the film dragged on, I kept thinking what a much more satisfying movie this might have been if it was Zebulon who was captured and whose story we followed. There would have been a film of much greater humanity, sensitivity and humour, if less macho posturing. Alas.
What troubled me most of all was the moral confusion at the heart of the film. What was the message again? A generation on, those bushido values led to the Japanese invasion of China, Pearl Harbor, and beyond.
Kurosawa, at least, never forgot that.