The Last Samurai

The Last Samurai is a 2003 American epic period action drama film directed and produced by Edward Zwick, who also co-wrote the screenplay with John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz from a story devised by Logan. The film stars Tom Cruise, who also produced, along with Timothy Spall, Ken Watanabe, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Koyuki Kato in supporting roles. The film's plot was inspired by the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, led by Saigō Takamori, and the Westernization of Japan by foreign powers.
Cruise portrays Nathan Algren, an American captain of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, whose personal and emotional conflicts bring him into contact with samurai warriors in the wake of the Meiji Restoration in 19th century Japan. The character of Algren is very loosely based on Eugène Collache and Jules Brunet, both French Imperial Guard officers who fought alongside Enomoto Takeaki in the earlier Boshin War.
The Last Samurai grossed a total of $456 million at the box office and became the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2003. It received praise for the acting, visuals, cinematography and Hans Zimmer's score but criticism for some of its portrayals. It was nominated for several awards, including four Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and two National Board of Review Awards.
In 1876, former U.S. Army Captain Nathan Algren, an alcoholic traumatized by the atrocities during the American Indian Wars, is approached by his former commanding officer, Colonel Bagley. Bagley asks him to train the newly created Imperial Japanese Army for a Japanese businessman, Matsue Omura, who intends to use the army to suppress a samurai rebellion against Japan's new emperor. Despite his hatred of Bagley, Algren takes the job for the money. His old friend, Sergeant Zebulon Gant, accompanies him. Upon arriving, Algren meets Simon Graham, a British translator knowledgeable about the samurai.
Algren learns that the imperial soldiers are poorly trained conscripts. While training, he learns of a samurai attack on one of Omura's railroads. Against Algren's wishes, Omura sends the soldiers in pursuit. However, the battle becomes a disaster, as the soldiers are quickly routed and flee, and Gant is killed. Algren is wounded, and he is taken prisoner when samurai leader Katsumoto spares him. Imperial General Hasegawa is allowed to commit seppuku.
Algren is taken to Katsumoto's village and, at Katsumoto's request, is taken in and tended to by Taka, Katsumoto's sister, who Algren later realizes is the widow of a samurai he killed before being taken prisoner. While initially poorly treated, he eventually gains the samurai's respect. With Taka's help, Algren overcomes his alcoholism and guilt, learns the Japanese culture, and is trained in the art of kenjutsu. He develops sympathy for the samurai, who are upset that modernization has eroded their traditions. Algren and Taka develop an unspoken affection for each other.
One night, ninjas infiltrate the village and ambush Katsumoto. Algren saves Katsumoto's life and then helps defend the village, concluding that Omura is responsible. Katsumoto requests a meeting with Emperor Meiji in Tokyo. He brings Algren, intending to release him. Upon arriving, Algren sees that the Imperial Army is better trained under Bagley. Katsumoto, to his dismay, discovers that the young and inexperienced emperor is a puppet of Omura. At a government meeting, Omura orders Katsumoto's arrest for carrying a sword in public and tells him to perform seppuku the next day to redeem his honor. Meanwhile, Algren refuses Omura's offer to resume command of the army. After defeating agents sent by Omura to assassinate him, Algren enlists Graham and Katsumoto's men to free their leader. During the rescue, Katsumoto's wounded son Nobutada sacrifices himself to allow the others to escape.
As the Imperial Army marches to crush the rebellion, a grieving Katsumoto contemplates seppuku, but Algren convinces him to fight and pledges to join the samurai in battle. They return to the village, and Taka dresses Algren in her late husband's samurai armor, and Katsumoto presents him with a newly-forged samurai sword engraved with an inscription dubbing Algren "the warrior in which the old ways have joined the new."
On the battlefield, Algren and Katsumoto meet with Omura and Bagley for parley; Bagley offers Katsumoto to surrender, which he refuses. The samurai use the Imperial Army's overconfidence to lure them into a trap; the ensuing battle inflicts massive casualties on both sides. With their numbers dwindling and imminent imperial reinforcements arriving, Katsumoto orders a suicidal cavalry charge on horseback. The samurai break through Bagley's line, and Algren kills Bagley, but the samurai are quickly mowed down by Gatling guns. The imperial captain, previously trained by Algren and horrified by the slaughter, orders to cease fire. Katsumoto, mortally wounded, commits seppuku with Algren's help as the soldiers kneel in respect.
Later, as trade negotiations conclude, the injured Algren interrupts the proceedings. He presents the emperor with Katsumoto's sword and asks him to remember the traditions for which Katsumoto and his fellow samurai fought and died. The emperor realizes that while Japan should modernize, it can't forget its own culture and history. He rejects the trade offer, and when Omura protests, the emperor tells him he has done enough and threatens to seize his fortune and distribute it to the people. The emperor asks Algren how Katsumoto died, to which Algren responds that he will instead tell the emperor how he lived. Algren returns to the village to reunite with Taka.
The producer's involvement in the film was originally developed in 1992 when Interscope Communications, a predecessor to Radar Pictures, developed the film, which was originally written by Michael Alan Eddy. Eddy sued the film's producers in 2004 claiming the WGA and Warner Bros. refused to give him credit.
Filming took place in New Zealand, mostly in the Taranaki region, with mostly Japanese cast members and an American production crew. This location was chosen due to the fact that Egmont/Mount Taranaki resembles Mount Fuji, and also because there is a lot of forest and farmland in the Taranaki region. American Location Manager Charlie Harrington saw the mountain in a travel book and encouraged the producers to send him to Taranaki to scout the locations. This acted as a backdrop for many scenes, as opposed to the built up cities of Japan. Several of the village scenes were shot on the Warner Bros. Studios backlot in Burbank, California. Some scenes were shot in Kyoto and Himeji, Japan. There were 13 filming locations altogether. Tom Cruise did his own stunts for the film.
The film is based on an original screenplay entitled The Last Samurai by John Logan. The project itself was inspired by writer and director Vincent Ward. Ward became executive producer on the film – working in development on it for nearly four years and after approaching several directors, including Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Weir, until he became interested with Edward Zwick. The film production went ahead with Zwick and was shot in Ward's native New Zealand.
Cinematographer John Toll invited Gary Capo on the project to serve as second unit director and cinematographer. Capo specifically supervised a lot of the filming of the climatic battle sequence between the Japanese army and the samurai.
The film was based on the stories of Eugène Collache and Jules Brunet, both French Imperial Guard officers, who fought alongside Enomoto Takeaki in the earlier Boshin War; and Philip Kearny, a United States Army (Union Army) and French Imperial Guard soldier, notable for his leadership in the American Civil War, who fought against the Tututni tribe in the Rogue River Wars in Oregon. The historical roles of other European nations who were involved in the westernization of Japan are largely attributed to the United States in the film, although the film references European involvement as well.
The Last Samurai: Original Motion Picture Score was released on November 25, 2003, by Warner Sunset Records. All music on the soundtrack was composed, arranged, and produced by Hans Zimmer, performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony, and conducted by Blake Neely. It peaked at number 24 on the US Top Soundtracks chart.
The Last Samurai had its world premiere in Tokyo in November 20, 2003. The film was released worldwide to theaters on December 5, 2003, by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Critical reception in Japan was generally positive. Tomomi Katsuta of The Mainichi Shinbun thought that the film was "a vast improvement over previous American attempts to portray Japan", noting that director Edward Zwick "had researched Japanese history, cast well-known Japanese actors and consulted dialogue coaches to make sure he didn't confuse the casual and formal categories of Japanese speech." Katsuta still found fault with the film's idealistic, "storybook" portrayal of the samurai, stating: "Our image of samurai is that they were more corrupt." As such, he said, the noble samurai leader Katsumoto "set my teeth on edge."
In the United States, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 66% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 221 reviews, with an average score of 6.4/10. The site's consensus states: "With high production values and thrilling battle scenes, The Last Samurai is a satisfying epic." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 55, based on reviews from 43 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying "beautifully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it's an uncommonly thoughtful epic."
One online analyst compares the movie favorably to Dances with Wolves in that each protagonist meets and combats a "technologically backward people". Both Costner's and Cruise's characters have suffered through a series of traumatic and brutal battles. Each ultimately uses his experiences to later assist his new friends. Each comes to respect his newly adopted culture. Each even fights with his new community against the people and traditions from which he came.
The film achieved higher box office receipts in Japan than in the United States. Upon its debut, it collected a total opening weekend gross of $8 million. Overall, it ranked number two at the box office behind Finding Nemo. It became the highest-grossing R-rated film there, surpassing The Matrix Reloaded. The film grossed $456.8 million against a production budget of $140 million. It grossed $111,127,263 in the United States and Canada, and $345,631,718 in other countries. It was one of the most successful box office hits in Japan, where it grossed ¥13.7 billion ($132 million).
Motoko Rich of The New York Times observed that the film has opened up a debate, "particularly among Asian-Americans and Japanese," about whether the film and others like it were "racist, naïve, well-intentioned, accurate – or all of the above."
Todd McCarthy, a film critic for the Variety magazine, wrote: "Clearly enamored of the culture it examines while resolutely remaining an outsider's romanticization of it, yarn is disappointingly content to recycle familiar attitudes about the nobility of ancient cultures, Western despoilment of them, liberal historical guilt, the unrestrainable greed of capitalists and the irreducible primacy of Hollywood movie stars."
According to the history professor Cathy Schultz, "Many samurai fought Meiji modernization not for altruistic reasons but because it challenged their status as the privileged warrior caste. Meiji reformers proposed the radical idea that all men essentially being equal.... The film also misses the historical reality that many Meiji policy advisors were former samurai, who had voluntarily given up their traditional privileges to follow a course they believed would strengthen Japan."
The fictional character of Katsumoto bears a striking resemblance to the historical figure of Saigō Takamori, a hero of the Meiji Restoration and the leader of the ineffective Satsuma Rebellion, who appears in the histories and legends of modern Japan as a hero against the corruption, extravagance, and unprincipled politics of his contemporaries. "Though he had agreed to become a member of the new government," wrote the translator and historian Ivan Morris, "it was clear from his writings and statements that he believed the ideals of the civil war were being vitiated. He was opposed to the excessively rapid changes in Japanese society and was particularly disturbed by the shabby treatment of the warrior class." Suspicious of the new bureaucracy, he wanted power to remain in the hands of the samurai class and the Emperor, and for those reasons, he had joined the central government. "Edicts like the interdiction against carrying swords and wearing the traditional topknot seemed like a series of gratuitous provocations; and, though Saigō realized that Japan needed an effective standing army to resist pressure from the West, he could not countenance the social implications of the military reforms. For this reason Saigō, although participating in the Okinoerabu government, continued to exercise a powerful appeal among disgruntled ex-samurai in Satsuma and elsewhere." Saigō fought for a moral revolution, not a material one, and he described his revolt as a check on the declining morality of a new, Westernizing materialism.
In 2014, the movie was one of several discussed by Keli Goff in The Daily Beast in an article on white savior narratives in film, a cinematic trope studied in sociology, for which The Last Samurai has been analyzed. David Sirota at Salon saw the film as "yet another film presenting the white Union army official as personally embodying the North's Civil War effort to liberate people of color" and criticizing the release poster as "a not-so-subtle message encouraging audiences to (wrongly) perceive the white guy -- and not a Japanese person -- as the last great leader of the ancient Japanese culture."
In a 2022 interview with The Guardian, Ken Watanabe stated that he didn't think of The Last Samurai as a white savior narrative and that it was a turning point for Asian representation in Hollywood. Watanabe also stated, “Before The Last Samurai, there was this stereotype of Asian people with glasses, bucked teeth and a camera, [...] It was stupid, but after The Last Samurai came out, Hollywood tried to be more authentic when it came to Asian stories.”