A wonderful experience.

Rating: 10/10 (8 December 2003)

And I say that honestly. The Last Samurai, to me, was a wonderful experience from the beginning to the end. The story telling aspects of the film can be formulaic, but they're formulaic for a reason: they work. Tom Cruise's character is a gateway character -- one with his own story at that, and his own inner demons -- for us to jump head first into an alien culture -- an often misunderstood alien culture -- and learn to embrace it, admire it, and adore it while he comes to do the same. To me, it worked. It worked on a plethora of levels. It echoed Sunzi's teachings in the Art of War to take in a prisoner of war and treat him as an equal -- which is what Katsumoto did. To sway him, and lure him away from his side to yours, and learn as much as you can from him. This, I think, is what the intent was behind in that essence of the picture. It was also a story of redemption for Cruise's character to redeem himself in his own mind from the things he'd done, or taken part of, in his past. And through bushido, and through zen buddhism he accomplishes that. While he doesn't attain enlightenment per se, he does change his life, his outlook, and become more than he was before. In Katsumoto's tale, we have a tarnished samurai, a samurai who, in some eyes, has betrayed and rebelled against his emperor -- whom he's supposed to remain loyal to the end of his own life. In his own eyes he's fighting not only for his emperor, but for his homeland as well. It shows a great conflict, not only between others, but between himself. Has he failed as a samurai or is he the epitome of the samurai?
In the telling of one story in this movie, we have the stories of several men -- two of them taking the forefront. And it's those stories that drive the picture completely, and I tend to think it did so with a style and grace that came close to the samurai epics of one Akira Kurosawa. Also in the telling of this story we are shown the beauty and the poetic side of the samurai, and of bushido, as well as the spiritual nature of those that followed it.
I think this film has several profound things to say, and it's really just a matter of whether you're listening or not.