Amply unfolded, albeit with a real sense of nuts and bolts execution at work, Zwick's film drags us around but ultimately into a world of alienation and shifting attitudes.

Rating: 6/10 (26 June 2011)

When we first observe the lead in Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai, he is sitting alone in a small room, looking dishevelled, backstage somewhere, as his presence at the evening's function he is partly hosting is verbally stirred to a large crowd. He looks rather despondent, as if only something akin to that of a house-fire could get him to shift out of his chair; around him, crumpled up American flags of the era lie strewn around encapsulating how it is he feels about both the nation he is presently in and the sorts of things more broadly linked to that of the warfare in which they are engaging. The man makes intermittent use of a bottle of hard liquor, both later whilst on-stage as well as now; each of these things seeing him firmly within a state of disenchantment and dissatisfaction at where he currently is in life. Whom he is, is Nathan Algren, played here by American actor Tom Cruise; what he is, is a fearsome Civil War Captain and all-round warrior figure whose experiences on the front line of America's untamed west in the 1870s has led him to be what he is now. His eavesdropping of the master of ceremonies talk him up as one thing, when it's clear he's something else, goes hand in hand with the erratic nature of his later performance; something which should have seen the reciting of stories from the front but instead, has Algren scare the audience half to death with a loaded rifle – the entire episode acting as the final straw for a change Algren sees fit to apply to his life.
That change, or turning of a proverbial page to begin anew, arrives in the form of a couple of cross dissolves; cross dissolves enabling us to leap to the port of Yokohama in an unobtrusive manner after a mite of exposition from those required to provide as such. Thus begins Algren's new existence, an existence allowing him to once again feel good about what it is he does well during the throngs of war thus incurring the reinvention of that drive to get up and fight once more for a cause. Edward Zwick's film goes on to formulate into a neat little war film-come-character study, something with an eye on the grandeur; an eye on the sweeping, all-embracing drama of it all in spite of the actual nucleus of what it is that's interesting here being the intricacies between varying cultures that co-exist as well as beliefs and minute shifts in attitude.
The seeds of Algren's arc to a happier existence begins with a small clan of Japanese warriors at war with those of whom occupy similar grounds. He is employed by the existing Japanese Emperor to whip an army of runts into shape; an army of whose recruits are without the necessary skills needed to take on this additional force in combat, of whom are a renegade bunch that have already up-and-gone off into the wilderness under the tutelage of a Colonel Kurtz-sort it's eventually revealed is none other than Ken Watanabe. In beginning with these troops, Algren is able to put aside all his prior problems with alcohol and begin afresh relatively quickly; his abilities as a warrior and skills as a teacher some would say unrealistically coming back to him in no time at all. His point of no return is established via his standing beside a large target and demanding a yet untrained warrior fire off a musket round; Algren is far from being afraid to die, and here displays a real dispassion toward his own life such is where he presently is.
The crux of the film arrives when that of the opponents to The Emperor's army arrive; shrouded in armour and ominous looking masks upon greeting the battlefield, they are mysterious and carry with them a preordained aura. Staying in sync with introducing something as one thing before breathing fresh life into them thereafter, the eventual developments see Algren caught and held by this renegade bunch, a bunch whom actually come across as rather nice and are a far cry from the threatening, inhuman introduction they carried. The film beds into a quaint groove of training montages and a flurry of forlorn facial expressions as time ticks by; Watanabe's interests lie in sticking to an older, more traditional way of life away from the modernising and expansion of Japan those of whom in the Emperor's ranks wish to adhere to - the parallels lying with the fact Zwick himself is sticking to a very old, very world weary framework but constructing the whole thing as if he were inventing the damn idea.
The film is not without a certain charm, nor indeed degrees of guile in its flicking through the necessary obligatory scenes allowing for one to overcome personal changes we are able to see coming and the conflict we observe nearing. Most of the early exchanges generally call to mind an awful lot of what Zwick did far more effectively in his 1989 film Glory, specifically those scenes involving Broderick's character and a squad of African-Americans, only here it is without the same level of bite. The Last Samurai is hit and miss; a film in which, away from all the obligatory shooting and slashing, lies an intricate character piece which works for what it is in the long run, but does enjoy a good action sequence in spite of the fact it is precisely these things that led its lead to the mind-frame he was in. Yet, the film is difficult to truly get riled about – it treads enough water to keep us involved to its finale and chugs along with a heavy, mandatory feel about proceedings, all too often leading to well executed, if rather tame dramatics.