Bullshit

Rating: 3/10 (19 January 2013)

When I watched this as a kid, almost a decade ago, I loved it. Awesome battles, yay! And when they ran it on TV a few hours ago, I was excited to watch it again. But my nostalgia filter was quickly overwhelmed by the movie's cheesiness.
To start with, the movie tries very hard to convince you that the samurai are the good guys and the Emperor's advisers are the bad guys. But let's think about that for a minute. The samurai are the nobility-like medieval warriors who sabotage railways and start civil wars because they lost their nobility-like status. Which included the right to execute commoners who didn't respect them. And the Emperor's people are the ones trying to reform and strengthen Japan before it becomes a European colony. But no, we get to see the samurai as noble savages, hunted down by their evil enemies and likened to the native Americans.
Further stomping on history, the samurai live in a small mountain village, live like Shaolin monks and refuse to sacrifice their honor by using firearms. Contrast the real rebellious samurai that the movie is based on, who were employed in government positions in cities and had no problem using guns. Oh, and many samurai accepted the reforms and joined the Imperial army, which consisted entirely of peasant conscripts in the movie.
None of the above would have been a problem if this was a fantasy movie, but it isn't advertised as such. And a lot of people will use it as a reference for that period of history, and for the samurai and Japan in general.
Moving on, we have the typical superhuman white person who has no trouble matching the sword fighting skills of the samurai after a few weeks of training. And he's apparently qualified to teach battlefield tactics to the same people who surrounded and slaughtered his own army just a few short months earlier. Oh, and he's also the only survivor of the final battle, miraculously getting missed by enough bullets to kill an army, and just shaking off the few that don't miss. That last bit is a problem with the movie in general, with the main characters being able to take multiple deadly hits and keep on fighting, for quite some time.
Finally, we have the ending, which literally made me yell "Bullshit!" at the screen. The impossible timing aside, we see the Emperor of Japan deciding that the wishes of the few dead samurai are more important than the well-being of the rest of his people. So he decides to halt the modernization of his country, right after his army had killed the only people who opposed that modernization!
The substance of the movie deserves 1 star, but the superb presentation elevates its score to 3.