An Exercise in Banality

Rating: 4/10 (11 July 2005)

This movie frustrates me endlessly. The Hollywood machine has been cranking out these cookie cutter historical dramas for the last 10 years now and while at first there was a freshness and a genuine quality to some of these early films (such as Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, even Gladiator), they have put out too many films in too short a time that are THE ESSENTIALLY SAME THING, differentiation occurring only in the setting of time and place.
Captured by enemy Japanese samurai, a US soldier who himself has witnessed the horrors of cultural manifest destiny comes to embrace the ways of the culture he was there to fight. Western boy meets world...Western Boy has inner conflict and must choose his allegiance...Western boy effuses emotion in a drawn-out, overacted 40 minute concluding sequence where people can take 40 bullets and still die slowly and in a touching way...Western boy becomes assimilated into new culture and lives happily ever after. Basically, western culture and history are slammed repeatedly by producers who concurrently make their living off of western commercialism in western theaters from hordes of western cola-drinking sheep.
The problem is that this movie looks really good artistically. They had a huge budget to get a good cast, beautiful scenes, and good action choreography. Yet they graft the same "makes you think" plot as Kingdom of Heaven, Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, etc. onto it - there's nothing original here! The only movie that uses more clichÃ©s than the Last Samurai has got to be Hidalgo.