64 slices of American Samurai Cheese

Rating: 7/10 (11 December 2003)

Definitely not a waste of time or money, but... well, let me put it this way:
***
Say you build your own house, and fill it with great furniture, and you really really love this house you built. And then one day a whole bunch of guys with bulldozers show up, say they're going to bulldoze your house to make room for a bypass (you've got to build bypasses!) and tell you it's all gonna go.
You get, fairly understandably, quite upset and decide to lie down in front of the bulldozers and let them run you over if they must, but this is you Taking a Stand.
The day before the bulldozers are slated to knock your house down, some schmuck from the road crew -- let's call him Tom -- wanders into your house and starts touching all your stuff. "Say, this is a pretty cool house," Tom says. "You've got some awesome stuff here, dude."
Tom is, in fact, so taken with your house that he decides to run outside with you the next day and lie in front of the bulldozer beside you, and nearly gets run over but doesn't. You die horribly. The next day, Tom chastizes the foreman of the building crew, who shrugs and says "eh, I guess maybe we shouldn't'a knocked over the house, but whatchagonna do. Let's maybe spare that tree over there."
***
Now... years later, somebody decides to make a movie about all this. Would you prefer (a) a film about the beauty of your house, the craft it took to construct it, its elegant and harmonious contents, and your futile yet noble struggle to preserve it, or (b) the story of that schmuck Tom, who wandered into your house, touched all your stuff and became a house groupie?
I was hoping for more (a), and I got more (b). So will you. This film may suit your needs well as an introduction to the concept of Samurai or as "Dances with Wolves II: Spars With Samurai", but I would have far preferred more respect for the tradition and its history rather than the surface treatment it got.
Samurai were also nasty, obsessive, subservient and horribly single-minded at times; I respect the culture immensely but I don't think the Hollywood gloss will be a big help in the long run.