Hey Man, Nice Shot

Rating: Null/10 (12 March 2004)

While watching it, you begin to realize that The Last Samurai is almost a carbon copy of dances with wolves, with a few minor changes. this movie takes place in japan, so the indians are replaced by samurai. other than that, all the themes and plot devices are disturbingly similar. There are even the same kinds of voice-overs by the main character, who also draws cute pictures of the natives in a little book. Also, they keep mentioning indians in this movie, so every five minutes you're reminded of it. I couldn't watch this movie without thinking of several other epic war/drama movies that it was eerily close to. Like the native americans, the samurai are on the verge of becoming obsolete, and are fighting to maintain the old ways of life in japan. Cruise, playing an alcoholic captain haunted by his bloodfilled past, goes to japan to help train troops to supress the samurai rebellion. To make a long story short, he ends up being captured by the samurai and adopting their ways of life and gaining a new respect for the people he once thought of as enemies, and so on and so forth.
I found cruise's acting in this movie to be somewhat jarring. I never really bought the fact that he was a man living in the 1800s - there's something just too modern about him and the way he acted in this movie. Aside from that, I thought that the samurai in the movie were portrayed in a completely one dimensional way. The movie showed them to be completely honorable, always morally upstanding, and to be great warriors. Which is fine, but is that how they really were? Yes, and no. I think things were more complex than that. A complexity this movie chose to ignore completely. As a previous reviewer observed "Samurai have a code, but are not perfectly moral and honorable individuals". From my severely limited understanding of feudal japan it seems that samurai were skilled warriors who dedicated their lives to serving their masters - but also that they were part of the aristocracy and would sometimes commit cruel and unjust acts against the lower classes with their superior social standing being their only justification. Basically, if you were a peasant in feudal japan, and you did something to anger a samurai, no matter how trivial, he could cut off your head and that would be perfectly ok with everyone. I'm not saying all samurai were like this, but that was acceptable behavior for the upper classes at one time. I don't know if that kind of thing was still going on during the time this movie was supposed to have taken place, but it was like this at one point. In light of this, maybe its not so suprising that many of the people in this movie seemed to be against the samurai - even though the movie never bothered to explore the question of why the samurai deserved to remain in power, other than the fact that they were the "good guys" and represented the "old ways". This movie doesn't deal with that at all, instead showing only one side of what the samurai were like - the politically correct side.

TLS disappointed me, although i should know better by now than to expect much from a hollywood epic. It LOOKED really good, if that means anything (probably not). The script was kind of lame. Some of the fighting was nice, though. As a whole, it was striving to be profound but seemed really contrived. I would have liked a more realistic version of the samurai. The ones in this movie never seemed human to me. They were just too perfect, politically correct, and glorified beyond all reason. I also found it hard to buy that the uber-traditionalist samurai in the movie would so totally accept a gaijin (foreigner) into their lives so readily like that, but whatever. if you want an entertaining and less completely homogenized view on feudal japan check out something like Blade of the Immortal, a japanese samurai manga (comic) by Hiroaki Samura. It's a comic book, but it is written and illustrated by a japanese and is supposed to be a pretty well-researched look at feudal japan, although the characters and story itself are fictional. It has been translated into english by dark horse comics. But then again, Blade of the Immortal is not very popular in japan, so take that how you will.
If you thought Dances with Wolves was condescending and unbelievable, you'll find The Last Samurai to be even more so, and less entertaining on even a mindless level. Hey, nice try, though. 5/10