An Epic Comprimised Only by Itself

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2004)

I just saw the latest Tom Cruise Action/Melodrama, The Last Samurai. The film was a mixed blend of good and bad cinema that culminated in an all too Hollywood ending. The film was directed by Edward Zwick who has a long history of making average but memorable films such as Glory and The Siege. The Last Samurai was no different.
The film is a story about Civil War hero Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) trekking to Japan to teach the new Japanese army the western ways of killing. Once there, he leads the shaky soldiers into battle against the Samurai and their leader, Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe). Algren is captured by the Samurai an ala Dances with Wolves adopts their ways and joins them. The two main themes of the movie are acceptance and redemption. The movie becomes an educational lesson for the viewer by underling the ignorance of the American's of the time and showing the greatness of the culture that they are saturating and destroying. The other theme of the movie that came to light was redemption. Through the film Algren has constant flashbacks that came to describe how his cavalry massacred a village of Native Americans.
The story is written fairly well but seems to lose believability and substance at key times. The dialogue of most of the conversations carries well, but many of the characters seem to contradict themselves. For instance Katsumoto seems to be content with halting modernization and does so by burning railways. Yet later on he tells Algren that he is the perfect samurai blending modern with the past.
The acting in this film, with the exclusion of Tom Cruise, was great. Ken Watanabe had a very commanding presence and was the star of the movie. In fact, the lot of Japanese actors and actresses in the movie were great. Tom Cruise on the other hand was the usual. It seems that for some reason he thinks that staring at something really hard is acting. I personally found him to be playing the same character arch from Vanilla Sky.
Some of the underlying plots were either good or blatantly unnecessary. Algren seems to bout with alcoholism through out the first half of the story but it magically goes away after one screaming night of pain. One of the other underlying plots that was presented very well is the film's depiction of the Japanese's repressed sexual tension by the supporting character Taka (Koyuki). This is an accurate subject that still can be sensed throughout Japan today.
The visual of the film is good but is laden with a mess of mediocre shots. The spacious establishing shots are constantly compromised by TV-like close-ups. It's almost like the cinematographer, John Toll, gave the camera to his assistant and went back to his trailer. The variation in visual style is shown best in back-to-back shots during a montage in the middle of the film. The first shot is a beautiful silhouette of Algren whisking his sword in the blowing grass in front of a setting sun. The second shot is of Alrgren and Katsumoto strolling through fake falling snow that blatantly screams sound-stage.
Probably the worst part about the film was the Hollywood ending (Spoiler but nothing really to spoil). In it the film Japanese Emperor Meiji accepts Alrgren's plea and decides that Japan should turn back from is modernization. In actuality Meiji led the Japanese on a whirlwind of modernization and took them to war against China, Korea and Russia during his reign. Despite being historically false, the Emperor also seems to belt out a lengthy conversation in English.
Being highly critical of the movie, there were still many great parts. One of the parts that I like was that the movie was done in the real dialogue of the characters. This meaning that for the large part of the movie that was in Japanese, they spoke it in Japanese. I really like this and felt that it added to the creditability of the film. It also created a film that relies less on its dialogue and more on its visual components.
The best part in the movie came when it actually submersed it's self in Japanese culture and sent in a team of ninjas to take out the samurai leader. I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the movie. Samurais versus ninjas, what else could you want?