One has to ask why Mr. Edward Zwick (The Siege, Courage Under Fire, Glory) made this film, “The Last Samurai.” This film is about an American Civil war hero who goes to Japan, in 1876, to fight the Samurai and quite naturally becomes one himself. What is Mr. Zwick trying to say? Is this a comment on recent American adventure of inflicting modernism on people who don’t need it or understand it? It probably is because other than that one is at a loss to understand why a glorifying movie will be made about a people who look more like the Taliban than anything else. It is impossible to support a people who are against westernization of their brutal feudal society. Thank God they didn’t last or we would never have had the pleasure of driving a Honda.
Tom Cruise is very involved, as he always is, in this project. He has put on muscle and other mannerisms to look like a drunken broken soldier. He has to deal with his demons raised during fighting ‘innocent’ red Indians. I am desperately looking for a hero in a picture who is not running away from his past. In a “single-serve” society it is amazing that so many people would even remember what happened yesterday let alone a past. Mr. Cruise is good anyhow. He is very precise and knows what to do and does it well.
The problem is the film’s story. Apart from a wrong plot to begin with, the story falls terribly short. There is no deep politics that made period films from the past great (Spartacus) and there is no passion that made period films from the recent past memorable (Brave Heart).
Who knows what Mr. Zwick was trying to achieve but his film is excruciatingly boring. Some scenes clearly done slowly for effect have quite a strong one – it can cure insomnia. Watch from Mr. Cruise getting into his new outfit for the final confrontation. It is almost a complete infomercial about how to be a metro sexual.
The Samurai war lord (Ken Watanabe), who we are supposed to respect, seems utterly incompetent. He may be the weakest link in the movie. Compare him to Chow-Yun Fat in the Crouching Tiger… movie and you will know what I mean. You don’t feel any sense of awe for Mr. Watanabe’s Katsumoto.
The Last Samurai may succeed where other movies have failed though. It may well be the last samurai movie ever made by Hollywood.
Tom Cruise is very involved, as he always is, in this project. He has put on muscle and other mannerisms to look like a drunken broken soldier. He has to deal with his demons raised during fighting ‘innocent’ red Indians. I am desperately looking for a hero in a picture who is not running away from his past. In a “single-serve” society it is amazing that so many people would even remember what happened yesterday let alone a past. Mr. Cruise is good anyhow. He is very precise and knows what to do and does it well.
The problem is the film’s story. Apart from a wrong plot to begin with, the story falls terribly short. There is no deep politics that made period films from the past great (Spartacus) and there is no passion that made period films from the recent past memorable (Brave Heart).
Who knows what Mr. Zwick was trying to achieve but his film is excruciatingly boring. Some scenes clearly done slowly for effect have quite a strong one – it can cure insomnia. Watch from Mr. Cruise getting into his new outfit for the final confrontation. It is almost a complete infomercial about how to be a metro sexual.
The Samurai war lord (Ken Watanabe), who we are supposed to respect, seems utterly incompetent. He may be the weakest link in the movie. Compare him to Chow-Yun Fat in the Crouching Tiger… movie and you will know what I mean. You don’t feel any sense of awe for Mr. Watanabe’s Katsumoto.
The Last Samurai may succeed where other movies have failed though. It may well be the last samurai movie ever made by Hollywood.