"The Last Samurai," an American film about an American Hero (Mild Spoilers).

Rating: Null/10 (7 December 2003)

"If your enemy thinks of the mountains, attack like the sea. And if he thinks of the sea, attack like the mountains." Miyamoto Musashi, ca. 1600.
You gotta love how Hollywood--at a time when the US has got the worst world image ever, has refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, and has imposed itself overseas in so many ways--doesn't blink an eye at inserting us Americans as heroes in another country's "history," at the same time that it pretends to be anti-American, anti-west, anti-technology, and so effing guilty over Nagasaki and the Native Americans. The Last Samurai! If I tell you who it is, you'll yell at me SPOILER! but I think you can figure it out, because predictability is the name of this game. It thinks we're thinking of the mountains and attacks like the mountains. How can I do better than Ted G's eloquent criticism of this movie? It's hard to top "it panders to the white man's ego (as in "Dances With Wolves") in that only a white man can save non-whites from evil whites," but that's exactly what ruffled my feathers about this film. Yes, I too grumbled on the way home that TLS had all the faults I disliked in "Dances With Wolves," including the phony hatred of us evil Americans (undoubtedly the norm), who must be set straight by an American expatriate.
Up until it was revealed who the Last Samurai was, I was intrigued by the depiction of two different kinds of warfare: the newfangled late nineteenth-century repeating rifles and early machine guns designed to become the contemporary face of war--where soldiers didn't really need to see their enemy, just crank the bullets out--against the medieval war tactics of soldiers on horseback with swords, bow 'n' arrow and face-to-face combat. That was fascinating. So was the guile used in the last battle; shades of Sun Tzu and Miyamoto (attack like the sea!). But the rest of the film didn't capture the real discipline and history of Japan. It has made me want to go research the movie's historical underpinnings (one good thing that came out of seeing the film). Who WAS the emperor of Japan in 1876? Did he REALLY call upon Americans to make an arms deal in 1876? What REALLY happened to the Japanese Samurai in 1876-77 (Meiji Restoration in 1868; Takamoto Saigo was the Samurai who led a rebellion against the Japanese forces), and did an American captain REALLY go and involve himself in their honorable demise, such that he becomes the star of the whole show? (No. Of course not). But it's that insertion, which the director claims (in an on-line interview I read somewhere) is an attempt to reflect upon Kurosawa's identification with American westerns, that annoys me for what it never intended to suggest: American self-congratulation and appropriation.

What was missing from the film, typically, was the patient depiction of the discipline that is REALLY involved in learning how to fight like a Samurai: the different positions--by foot, by hand, by sword--and their different names and philosophies that have to be painstakingly learned over years, and that no Japanese warrior would stint on. Nathan Algren learns it in a season from teachers who seemed remarkably accepting for a warrior aristocracy that viewed even its fellow Japanese with disdain. And what about the score that saturated the film? Did you notice how so very little of it was Japanese? Western sentimental orchestral melodies permeating every last gouge and lunge, and especially throughout the sentimental scenes at the end. Couldn't they have invoked SOMETHING more Japanese than that? I think that the American element could have been cut out of this altogether, including Tom Cruise, and that a creditable film in collaboration with Japanese film makers could have been made about the real last Japanese Samurai facing an increasingly westernized Japanese military. But then we might have had a film about Takamoto, and not Katsumoto, and certainly not a Hollywood tear jerker.
My advice: go rent "Rob Roy" (1995) for a much more compelling film about war and intrigue and history. Or go rent Kirosawa's "Seven Samurai."