It wasn't really about eye candy.

Rating: 6/10 (19 September 2005)

"The Last Samurai" (good riddance) is a Japanese Western along the lines of the Japanese samurai genre of the 1930s-1950s. Its visual scale is comparable to the late Kirusawa epics, but its content is a derivative hash of American Westerns and Clavell's "Shogun". The most laudable feature of the film is its cinematography. For those of us who admire antique Japanese design, the eye candy is very nice. But the end of the samurai culture was not about eye candy. I think the film misses this point entirely. It also was not about rugged (American) individualism fighting against corporate corruption. These are American stories which could be told again these days. The ending of the samurai culture was akin to the current turmoil in the (Saudi) Arab world. Samurai were xenophobic feudal creatures like Usama Bin Ladin, confronted by an Industrial Age, championed by an emperor who received a modern education for his time. The Hollywood propensity for making everything black-and-white from an antique American (cowboy's) moral viewpoint poisoned what could have been a wonderful film about the complexity of progress and human evolution.