Awesome (****)

Rating: 10/10 (12 December 2003)

Akira Kurosawa's 1954 masterpiece "Seven Samurai" is one of my favorite films of all time. The word "samurai" is in my e-mail address. So I like this kind of movie. Still, for some reason I wasn't expecting much from this film. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Tom Cruise playing a samurai, much as I like him, struck me as less-than-promising. Whatever the case, I'm glad I went, because not only is it good, it is one HELL of an amazing film.
Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a Civil War veteran who is known publicly as a "war hero", but he is not proud of it. He is an alcoholic and is haunted by the memory of the war, particularly being ordered to slaughter innocent Native Americans.
His new job is to go to Japan and train the Emperor's troops to wipe out the last of the country's samurai culture. In the first battle, though, he is taken prisoner by the samurai troops, led by Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe). Over a period of several months being their prisoner, Nathan gradually begins to understand their way of life and respect their dedication to honor and nature, and for probably the first time since before the war, he feels like he belongs somewhere.
"The Last Samurai" is, without a doubt, one of the most visually impressive films of the year. There are many shots that are simply stunning in their beauty, and even if some of them were computer generated, I didn't care. Even in the indoor scenes, the cinematography is perfect. The battle sequences are thrilling and terrifying, and the mournful, emotive score by Hans Zimmer evokes memories of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".

So on the surface, the film is pretty much perfect. Which would be pretty cool on its own, but thankfully the film goes deeper. It takes its time detailing Algren's slow change of mind. It feels realistic because we know that this man had literally nothing but pain in his life, and found something new to live for in samurai culture.
Another one of the film's main assets is the moving friendship that slowly evolves between Cruise's and Watanabe's characters. Cruise is very good as usual, but it's Watanabe's breathtakingly passionate performance that gives the film its heart and soul. When these two characters, who began the film diametrically opposed, work together and understand each other, it made me think of the great friendships in the action films John Woo used to make before he became just another Hollywood director.
So is there anything in "The Last Samurai" that you haven't seen before? Probably not. But I can tell you that this is about as good as epic, mainstream Hollywood filmmaking gets. It's enormously exciting, suspenseful, fast-paced, it has a number of great characters, and it engages all the right emotions at all the right moments without being too manipulative.

You could argue that it's not all that deep (and I might even agree), but there are certainly resonant themes of honor, self-discovery, the death of unfairly outmoded cultures, and the absurdity of war. It's about all those things, but mainly it's about serving you up a great, involving story, and there it definitely succeeds.