Tom Cruise is Samurai.

Rating: 4/10 (25 March 2020)

'The Last Samurai' is a film that does a lot right but so much wrong. Eventually succumbing to the twin perils of becoming a Tom Cruise centrefold vehicle and a painfully over earnest tragedy.
Excellent photography and locations throughout the film are matched by lovely sets and costumes. The musical score fits the film better as it goes on and there are two or three very engagingly staged action scenes with lots of well edited cuts, sound effects, practical special effects, extras all generating choreographed mayhem.
It is clear to me that 'The Last Samurai' was designed as a very soapy and emotional epic historical tragedy complete with a tone of great deeds and greater losses from the receding past. In effect a soft or sallow hero movie rather than a bombastic or assertive one.
In doing this there are large heroic themes played on with this film; themes such as outsiders and outcasts not belonging in their time and place, old vs new, loyalty and humility vs selfishness and dishonesty, damage and redemption, and of course change and the passing of things.
These are most obviouse in the person of Tom Cruise's protagonist and in the interactions between different factions of Japanese society and through the captivity middle section of the film where Cruise's character is the hostage of the rebels.
All taken together 'The Last Samurai' has so much loaded into it and it becomes mawkish and morose in equal measure as earnest soap and flannel come to a cloying emotional payoff; or series of payoffs. All via the incredibly versatile, indestructible and irresistible Tom Cruise protagonist.
So much soap and flannel, so much Tom Cruise, that by the end 'The Last Samurai' has vacated any meritorious territory and is on full orgasmic emotional romanticism.
I rate 4/10 because there is a lot of good pumped into this monster but it accumulates into an astonishingly overwrought and overstated mess.