'Born on the Fourth' tries Kurosawa, gets 'Dances with Wolves'

Rating: Null/10 (5 December 2003)

Spoilers herein.
This film is so ordinary that it immediately elicits all the ordinary responses:

it panders to the 'white man's' ego (as in 'Dances with Wolves'), in that only a white man can save the non-whites from evil whites.

it obsessively collects stereotypes in its quest to be 'accessible' because so much is at stake that every risk must be avoided. Several clichés duke it out for victory: will it be the drunk soldier ashamed of his past? Will it be the woman who cannot help but fall in love? Or perhaps the one man in thousands who is still standing at the end of the day?

it preaches observance, discipline and respect for the art of life and then in its fabric and execution compromises on every element of those.

But you knew that. You probably also knew that the target was Kurosawa: his amazing mass combat choreography (which is more a matter of a sonata of motion than of person killing person), his samurai themes (not at all unique to Kurosawa, but he brought them to the west with '7 Samurai') and even his faces (for instance the 'speechless samurai' strongly resembles the quiet one in '7').
What you may not appreciate is that Kurosawa crafted every frame as Japanese painting: many layers with no perspective. He worked hard with his optics and staging to accomplish this, and was so successful that the samurai genre is necessarily tied to this cinematic world.
Zwick has none of that. This world is bright and deep. He really does think that the perfect blossom is a matter of physical beauty. He profoundly allies himself with the unknowing American business interests that visit with the intent of exploitation. He solidly equates this rich cinematic culture with Injuns, who he thinks can benefit what we can impose as a world view.
(For example, he takes the normally quick bursts of staccato Japanese, and tones them down so they have the languor of Italian. )
What he needs is a dose of 'McCabe and Mrs Miller,' in a double bill with 'Rikyu.' It is what you, dear reader, might view instead of this obsession with the mundane.
I have come to believe that the big box office stars doom every project they are in. They simply cost so much that each project demands over a hundred million in production and nearly that in promotion. So someone like Cruise automatically ruins a project because they need to water it down so much. That's before the star makes his demands, like the tackedon ending here, designed only for his mugging - and even before intrinsic limits of what the star can do. Cruise had power before, during the 'Color of Money' period. Now he's a star instead of an actor.
The best thing of this film to my mind was the wonderful design of the typeface used in the subtitles. It is a 'humanist' face, something between precise calligraphy and mechanical venetian-roman type. It has energy, individuality and soul, just like this film could have. These letters are servants just like the samurai, something that Jarmusch understood with ' Ghost Dog.'
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.