Dancing With Wasabe

Rating: 5/10 (5 December 2003)

Amusing and enjoyable in parts, "The Last Samurai" is ultimately pretentious, indeed silly. And wooden. With Tom Cruise in the lead this should be no surprise.
1876 was a banner year for Americans as they celebrated the centenary of independence. Patriotic fairs and festivals dotted the land. A bump in the rejoicing was Lt. Col (Brevet Major General) George Custer's vainglorious disobedience of orders which led, eventually, to the Little Big Horn National Battlefield Park. And cemetery.
Somehow 7th Cavalry captain Nathan Algren, Tom Cruise, missed the fun at the Grassy Grease and we meet him, trauma-ridden and booze-besotted, hawking "The Gun That Won the West" at a carnival. His inebriation putting paid to this employment he is ordered by his detested superior, Colonel Bagley, Tony Goldwyn, to travel with him to Japan and train the Meiji emperor's new western-style army. We're in the heady but turbulent first years following the Meiji Restoration when Japan sought to catch up with western nations and, in this film, the American Military-Industrial Complex can't wait to outfit his troops and reap the rewards, mostly monetary.
Cruise's Algren is transparently captive to memories - frequent nightmares - of a murderous assault on an Indian village where women and children were slaughtered. Those familiar with an especially dismal episode in frontier history will recognize Algren's flashbacks as the horrendous so-called Battle of the Washita, a permanent stain on Custer's reputation. And on the Army's.
Algren despises Bagley but he takes his orders, like a good soldier, from him. He does this for $500 a month (let's ignore the issue that he's a serving army officer and ought not to be privately employed).
Not to miss anything formulaic, Algren's recruits are in worse shape than the men generals McDowell and McClellan had to whip into shape as the Army of the Potomac (did I mention that Algren has the Medal of Honor from that internecine conflict?).
As so often happens in both real life (tragically) and the movies (expectedly), troops prematurely committed to battle fail the test and the emperor's soldiers here are beaten and routed. Somehow Algren is captured alive as Samurai-in-Chief Katsumoto, Ken Watanabe, witnesses and respects his extraordinary bravery. Watanabe is a typical feudal warlord who speaks excellent English and writes poetry.
What follows is highly predictable. With earnest debts to "The King and I," "Shogun" and myriad Jackie Chan movies, Algren becomes part, slowly, of Katsumoto's clan. They don't all love him at first but, hey, he IS Tom Cruise. Katsumoto's samurai can't co-exist, we're told, with an emerging modern Japan so the stage is set for a titanic battle.
A clash of cultures-yes, we have a dawning recognition by Algren, stolidly telegraphed by Cruise, that we should share. It's that the samurai are not savages, as Bagley claims, but are part of that diminishing cohort of noble natives facing cultural and indeed physical extinguishment at the hands of western, here American, inspired modernity. We've seen it all before. Thank you Commodore Perry.
But I don't want to be too negative. Sure, we admire the samurai who are desperately resisting destruction whether or not they get with the Meiji program. But let's look at the bright side. Without the Meiji steamroller re-make of Japan we might never have had the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, Pearl Harbor, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or SONY and NINTENDO.
There's a fair amount of Japanese dialogue with subtitles. I'd love to see the reverse when this flick screens in Japan.
The cinematography is superb-the country scenes are breathtaking. The music is Ninja-film standard.
Tom Cruise's films make money and so will this one. Director Edward Zwick was scrupulously careful not to allow any originality to enter into the story. Anyone who can't predict where this film is going from the first twenty minutes should be condemned to a lifetime of viewing only Ed Wood movies.
5/10.
P.S. If any readers don't know what wasabe is, it's one of Japan's greatest culinary gifts, the ultimate sinus-clearing condiment.