The Last Samurai

[BlkbrryTheGreat]

One of the best, most enjoyable films I've seen in a LONG time. While the underlying theme of the Samurai seems, at first glance, to be anti-technology (a stance to which I'm obviously opposed) as the film went on I began to think the message was more directed towards stopping corruption. Thoughts anyone?

[Keevan_Colton]

I couldnt get to the issues, I was too busy laughing my ass off at bad FX to try and make a certain star look less of a midgit...

[HemlockGrey]

It was ok, the fight scenes with the ninja looked pretty cool and the Japanese actor outshined Tom Cruise (not terribly difficult, of course), but some parts of it were annoying; like, for example, how the samurai armed with bows hit the soldiers EVERY TIME THEY FIRED whereas the soldiers couldn't hit the broadside of a barn during the escape from Tokyo, or how the samurai didn't use guns even though they did historically, or how the military advisors were American and not Prussian...

[Sarevok]

The Last Samurai was a fairly good film in my opinion.

[The Prime Necromancer]

One of the best, most enjoyable films I've seen in a LONG time. While the underlying theme of the Samurai seems, at first glance, to be anti-technology (a stance to which I'm obviously opposed) as the film went on I began to think the message was more directed towards stopping corruption. Thoughts anyone?

Perhaps, but really if you look a little deeper, it truly is anti-progress. That is, if you know anything about Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate. The movie, of course paints a nice rosy picture of samurai, but really it's no different from the romanticism of the medieval knight. Not just anyone could become samurai, it was more or less limited to noble families. Did you know that samurai were legally allowed to simply slay any commoner who they felt did not show them proper respect? Finally, the primary thing the samurai were fighting to keep was their own supremacy, as they were the ones who ran the government during the Tokugawa era, with the emperor as a figurehead. In fact, by the late Tokugawa era, they were more frequently bureaucrats than warriors.

The Meiji Restoration was a *very* good thing for Japan. It brought new technologies and more importantly new ideas to the forefront. Of course there would be some corruption with that much rapid change going on. But at least it was a step in the right direction.

As for the movie, I must admit it is quite well done, and if you turn off your brain, it is quite easy and enjoyable to get caught up in the romanticism of it. Although the movie does provide further proof that Americans think they're the center of the universe and an American has had a hand in every important event to ever happen ever.

[Tzeentch]

The Meiji Restoration was a *very* good thing for Japan. It brought new technologies and more importantly new ideas to the forefront. Of course there would be some corruption with that much rapid change going on. But at least it was a step in the right direction.

Yeah, I also found the whole romanticising feudalism a little unpleasant.

The real thing that bugged me is that the last ten minutes of the movie should never have existed. The main character should have died with the rest of the samurai. It would have finished the story both on a note of change (the new era has arrived), and on a note of redemption; the main character has paid for his sins with honorable death, having finally found the moral warrior creed he longed for; and not tested our credibility in the way the real ending did. This would have acknowledged both the allure of honor and its ultimate impracticality in the modern world.

As it was, up until the very end, tho, I really liked the film.

Apart from

[Deathstalker]

I agree with you Tzeentch. Talk about character shield!. Maybe TC being short helped him not get hit. A gatling gun spitting out hundreds of rounds a minute should have killed every living thing on that field

[Bob McDob]

Perhaps, but really if you look a little deeper, it truly is anti-progress.

Eh, I didn't really see it that way ... maybe it was because I went into the movie knowing all this, and I ended up looking too hard. I wrote the following shortly after seeing the film.

The Samurai are a hinderance to progress, and they know it, but they fight anyway because that is the only way they have ever known, and the only way they can live. Everything basically culminates in the "meatgrinder scene where everyone dies" - it seems like a classical tragedy in that sense. The samurai's own pride and conservatism is what causes their eventual downfall.

I thought the bit at the end, about Japan charting a rocky road to the present, was an ironic touch,

Anyway, the important part is that no movie with New Zealand in it can ever be truly bad.