After thousands of years of war, we are no closer to peace than we have ever been.

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2004)

I remember being initially put off by a movie with 'Samurai' in the title and starring Tom Cruise, but like Brad Pitt did in Troy recently, Cruise delivers a powerful performance as a Civil War veteran whose meaningless life takes a shocking turn after being sent on an assassination assignment. We meet Cruise sitting backstage, about to be called on to speak to an adoring crowd about his military experiences, and he stumbles onstage, drunk and belligerent, and winds up pulls out his rifle and firing several shots above the shocked heads of the crowd. So yeah, war had a not so good effect on him and he's not too happy with life.
He takes an assignment to assassinate the samurai leader Katsumoto, and after a vicious battle, Nathan Algren (Cruise) is taken prisoner be captors who clearly respect/fear him because he fought a circle of men literally until he could not stand, killing the last one of them while lying flat on his back. The Americans were in the process of aiding Japan's eager transition from the Old ways to the ways of the West, the process of which provides endless opportunities for massive financial gain in areas like weapons and trade. Algren is already disgusted with the military because of a traumatic experience he had in following what he always felt was an immoral order from a superior officer, Colonel Bagley (Tony Goldwyn), who he never forgives and is never faced with reason to. That particular battle is only hinted at in a series of fast and blurry flashbacks, but it is more than enough to get the idea that it involved sacking a village that Algren believed had nothing to do with their conflict, and it resulted in the deaths of the entire population, including women and children.
After being taken prisoner by Katsumoto, he is returned to Katsumoto's village and kept as a prisoner, but here is the difference between the Civil War era Americans and the samurai Â– the Americans want to know their enemy, the samurai want to understand their enemy, and as the rest of the movie shows, there is a huge difference between knowing your enemy and understanding your enemy, not the least of which is that the former is generally useful toward the purpose of killing them, the latter more useful in the purpose of understanding why they live and fight the way they do.
Algren begins his captivity as a prisoner, albeit one with an amazing amount of freedom within the village. He is not imprisoned, but rather allowed to roam the grounds, exploring the area and people, and only reminded that he's a prisoner of war by the studying looks he receives from everyone he passes, particularly as he passes groups of warriors training for battle. Algren gets to know the people and their culture, as do we along the way, and we grow to appreciate their culture and their way of life, the cleanliness, honor, and respectability, especially when it is contrasted by Colonel Bagley's calling them savages armed only with bows and arrows. This juxtaposition of the American prejudices toward the samurai and our developed respect for the organization of their culture is indeed unsettling.
I just watched Fahrenheit 9/11 a few weeks ago and have since automatically seen parallels between the events in the Middle East and almost every movie I watch (I even managed to make two connections which you can find in my review of Day of the Dead, of all movies), so I try not to talk too much about parallels in every movie, but the ones here are too much to overlook, especially when America is so occupied with battling what are often called insurgents or savages. Given the videotapes that these people put on the internet, I tend to agree with naming them vicious savages, but The Last Samurai is a reminder that such terms simply cannot be applied to populations or cultures in their entirety. There are savages in EVERY culture.
I think this movie may have gone a little far in that the samurai were completely pure, there was no counterpart of Colonel Bagley on their side, for instance, which tends to suggest to me that the movie is more interested in promoting an understanding of cultures that so many people know nothing about. It's scary to watch this movie and see all of the good, moral people on both sides who kill each other and are killed when, as is in this case most demonstrated by Colonel Bagley, the primary reasoning behind it all is a lack of mutual understanding.
After spending some time in captivity, Algren comments in a voice-over that he has slept well in this village for the first time in many years, a curious statement which highlights the irony that the only way he found peace was through his experience as a prisoner of the very culture he was sent to destroy. This has to be one of the clearest and most effective anti-war statements I've ever seen in a movie.
The relationships that develops between Algren and Matsumoto is, obviously, where the majority of the film's message lies, as they grow from enemies to comrades on the battlefield. There are striking comparisons between the samurai's willing to die for honor (which, in sharp contrast to American beliefs, can be achieved through suicide) and what I think is a more apprehensive view of death on the American side. I believe that Americans see deaths on the battlefield as something tragic, a necessary amount of suffering in the name of something for which we as a people largely believe in (hence the enormous importance that going into war is done for just reasons), while the samurai see death on the battlefield as a good death, an honorable one.
The divide is sharp, but the two of them find connection in their values, not their cultures, and especially in their view of honor. Their mutual understanding of deaths in battle as honorable is the seed upon which they are able to build their relationship with each other. Despite so many seemingly uncross-able differences, this one belief leads to their understanding and respect of each other, which personally left me hoping that one day this might happen in the world on a larger scale.