I've seen The Last Samurai
 

And I loved it! And, for those of you complaining about Dances with Katanas, I liked this movie better than Dances With Wolves. So nyah.

The scenery is absolutely stunning in this movie. If Braveheart made me want to visit Scotland, this one makes me want to visit Japan. The costumes are also quite beautiful, the armor alone is fascinating.

The fight scenes are amazing, the best I've seen since Braveheart. You can tell that Tom Cruise spent a lot of time training for the fight scenes.

The best reason to see this movie, however, is Ken Watanabe, who plays the samurai rebel leader. He is a fine, fine actor and I hope he'll do more movies for American audiences--I'm also interested in seeing movies he's done in Japan. He really gives an amazing performance.

Anyways, I give it 4 stars. So that means more than bupkus: some of my other 4 star favorites are Braveheart, Shawshank Redemption, A Few Good Men, and Unforgiven.

I liked it too. Not sure I'd give it 4 stars, there were some historical anachronisms that bugged me and a few plot holes but still a pretty damn good movie. It was Tom's bid for an Oscar, I expect he might just pull it off.

Except that The Last Samurai was filmed in New Zealand. :D

Yeah, but that's kind of like filming Sleepy Hollow in England rather than New England. There is just not much of Japan left that looks like Japan. :) At least not affordably.

Does this mean if Enforcer sees a film that was made in Japan, he'll want to visit New Zealand?????

The sword fights: B+.

The full-scale battle scenes: A.

The panoramic scenery: B+. (In my opinion, only the LotR films deserve an A in this category. And, yes, I realize Last Samurai was shot in New Zealand.)

The costumes: B+.

The acting, overall: B. (Cruz does not deserve an Oscar for this one, but his co-star, Ken Watanabe, might.)

The plot: C-. (Would've rated a B+, if not for the last 15 minutes of the film.)

Historical accuracy: D. (This one was worse than Braveheart, IMHO.)

Philosophical anachronisms and modern-day political correctness: F. (I found this especially irksome about the film. Don't know who it's pandering to more: modern-day Americans, or modern-day Japanese. "Dances with Samurai", indeed!)

What stood out as wrong? User spoiler tags.

Well, for one, the last of the samurai in real life did not go out in a blaze of glory like they did in the movie. For another, samurai in real life were not such "purists" that they were above employing muskets and cannons in battle. (Watch Kurosawa's movie masterpiece, Ran, to see what I mean.)

It also irked me that, in the movie, samurai were depicted as being so noble and selfless, when in real life, the majority of them were elitists, bullies, and warmongers. (Just as the majority of European knights were.) Furthermore, samurai were not defenders of the people, as was said in the movie -- samurai in real life were protectors of their lord's lands and properties, as well as enforcers of the Emperor's laws and whims.

BTW: When Tom Cruise's character was learning how to wield the katana, and during that practice match where it was first occurring to him to use a Zen-like awareness in order to better fight his trainer, I leaned over to my wife and whispered, chuckling, "Use the force, Luke!" And that's pretty much what Tom Cruise's character did. What a hoot!

Oh well, sounds entertaining at the least. :)

New Zealand? Crap. Was the scene where Alrgen first sees the island of Honshu and Mt. Fuji from the boat real at least?

Anyways, they sure fooled me. As for historical accuracy, I don't care. It's not a documentary, it's a fictional account. Same with Braveheart, despite the real-life characters it's not a documentary.

They screwed up the sword ettiquite too, when Tom gets his sword he compleately draws it in front of the man who gave it to him with the edge faceing him. That wouldn't have been done. He would have turned it so the edge was faceing himself and drawn it halfway.

The Japanese troops had Bolt Action rifles in 1877 which struck me as a little odd seeing as how they made their first apperance in the mid eightteen eighties in the hands of a Prussian army.

The noble selfless protecter of the pesants thing was a little odd too though I think that monderen day society tends to accept the view that the lives of pesants were a lot worse than they actually were praticularly before industrialization. Some times were worse than others, the 14th century in europe would have been a lousy place to be a pesant, but then again it kinda sucked for the nobility too.

Gunpowder had also been used throughout Japan since the Shogunate wars something like 3 or 4 hundred years before this. Dutch traders had been bringing matchlock and wheellock muskets from europe for hundreds of years. They weren't as prevalent as they were in europe but they were there none the less and I've seen a contempory painting from the 16th or 17th century which showed a samurai in full armour holding a pistol.

The Swiss were the first to adopt a magazine fed bolt action rifle in the eary 1870's.

By the late 16th century (1580 or so) there were more firearms being used in combat in Japan than anywhere else in the world. That was only 40 years after they were introduced to the Japanese by the Dutch in 1543

but the Prussians were the first to use it in battle.

Thanks for clearing that up. I did a project on the earliest traders to make their way to Japan but it was almost 4 or 5 years ago now, dates have gotten kinda fuzzy.

It's important to remember that gunpowder was introduced to Japan during the Shogunate wars, which were probably equivilant in scale to the hundred years war in Europe. It was a very ugly knock down drag em out fight and most of the factions would seize upon any possible advantage they could gain over their opponants includeing gunpowder.

Actually, the Prussians used them against the Austrians in 1866.

Edit: Whoops! I forgot those were single shot rifles. The magazine fed guns came in 1884. Sorry.

Both France and Prussia had single shot bolt-action rifles in the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71), FWIW.

Yeah, and the Prussians learned most of their tactics from having hordes of military observers here in the USA during the American Civil War (truth: second largest number of military observers, after Great Britain).

I enjoyed it for the fights, the cinematography, and their attempt (poor and utterly incaccurate though it was) to show a poignant clash of a traditional culture and modernization.

What I did not enjoy was the revisionist anti-American PC history. Talk about raping a culture's history (both Japan and the U.S.) so that Edward Zwick could spoon feed everyone his social opinions.

I lived in Japan for two years and speak Japanese. I think many Japanese people will like this movie because its a celebration of their own traditional culture, they like Tom Cruise, and they love it when Hollywood makes cool movies about Japan. My wife, who is Japanese, loved it for all those reasons.

But the historical inaccuracies, plot holes you could drive a truck through, and the modern day PC BS just made me cringe. The movie would have been so much better without that last scene with the emperor:

Algren: "Here are Katsumoto's swords, Emperor. He died fighting for the noble and pastoral way of life of your traditional and beautiful culture."

Emperor: "Oh, thank you for showing me how the evil capitalist American white-man and his guns has corrupted and destroyed our idyllic and utopian existence. I shall now grow a backbone and honor my unique and special culture by rejecting this treaty with the evil industrialist West."

Gag me... :rolleyes:

Come on it wasnt that strident. The film is a celebration of non industrial values and sentimentality. Remeber the line "if Japan is a whore, it is the samurai who have made her so". Industrialization of course creates huge disruption to traditional life, be that Japanese or European peasants forced off their land, feudal land lords, native populations, or even more recently ethnic minority neighborhoods destroyed to make way for american roads in the fifties.

A call to remember and value the past while progressing to the future is not the same as what you described the emperor as saying.

I concede that the film was more heavy handed,(and inaccurate) for my tastes, but the same could be argued for the novel The Jungle, or any artistic work advocating a strong position.

Artistic works never = scholarly rigor.

It certainly was a much better film than Dances with Wolves, where all things white and American were cast as evil.

I thought America is evil.

Feudal peasants had no land, the lords owned it. For better or worse, industrialization gave the peasants someplace to go in order escape "their land". For the most part it opened opportunities that otherwise would have been unavailable.

Industrialization only destroys the fuedal lifestyle and the gentry class, but give way for the aristocrats and industrial barons, who still continues the practice of getting in the way of mom & pop businesses.