The Epic Adventure Movie of the Year

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2019)

6 December 2003. With the similar trappings of "Dances with Wolves," and "Braveheart," "The Last Samurai" holds to the same level of richness, intensity, complexity, and grandeur as its predecessors. Every few years, a movie comes out that captures a national experience with a foreign flavor that both examines the epic as well as the intimate personal scale of experience. The Last Samurai presents the audience a solid and carefully crafted epic of a nation undergoing dramatic and revolutionary change as well as the complex, subtle trappings of cultural differences (particularly difficult when it comes to a culture such as Japan). With emotional sincerity and respect to Japanese culture and tradition, the high class Japanese language used in the movie captures the level of seriousness upon which those involved cultivated their craft and produced this movie. Unlike its predecessors, it takes a somewhat harder line and perhaps simplified portrait of the evils of society and the trappings of political intrigue as well as a loosening of script towards the end. As with "Dances with Wolves" but with an even less effective ending the movies unnecessarily overextends the ending ending by about thirty seconds too long (that is suggestive of American producer and mass audience testing might require or dictate for better word of mouth ratings and profits). While perhaps not exactly reaching the same league of its former film epic giants with its slight blemishes, this movie is definitely the epic adventure movie of the year and maybe the last several years. Eight out of ten stars.