Artistic License

Rating: 7/10 (15 June 2005)

Oh dear. The Last Samurai, directed by Edward Zwick (of the equally problematic Glory, with Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, as well as the prophetic Under Siege), has directed a movie that is a Hollywood gumbo of historical facts, romantic fabrication and artistic license.
The main character, captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), is sent to Japan so his Indian wars AND civil war experience can be put to use, teaching the Japanese modern warfare.
One problem is that Zwick plays havoc with the timeline. In one scene, Algren witnesses a samurai having his top knot cut off by a squad of Japanese soldiers in Western uniforms, to which his friend Simon Gray (Timothy Spall) says: 'It has begun'. This then must have been during the Meiji Restoration, when the Samurai lost their privileges, from 1866 to 1869, just after the American Civil War (which ended in 1865), during which the Samurai lost the privilege to wear their top knot and their two swords.
However, Algren also claims to have been traumatized, fighting Indians under George Armstrong Custer, who was killed at the battle of Little Big Horn, in 1876, at least 7 years later.
I have serious doubts that the Samurai versus modern army battle ever took place, and if it did, it certainly was not after 1876.
Then, there is the unlikely Madam Butterfly romance between the Yankee soldier and the wife of the Samurai he killed. At one point, she asks for permission to kill herself. Wouldn't it have occurred to Algren's protector Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), that she may also try to kill him by slipping something into his food or the sake he drinks so much of? Oh and by the way, the Japanese had experience with firearms before. However, because of high casualty rate on both sides, which led to famine (most of the foot soldiers were farmers), they were banned.
The movie does however give an accurate picture of how the new weapons (howitzers, machine guns, rifles) made a huge impact in warfare, and made "modern" colonialism possible. It is no coincidence that colonialism came to it's high point (with the 1885 Vienna Conference) when these faster weapons made decisively defeating Native forces (Zulus, Native Americans, Indians) possible. The irony of course is that it were these weapons that came back to bite the West and destroy it only 40 years later, in Flanders fields.