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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1298851" data-attributes="member: 812">Have finally seen it. Not nearly as bad as it might have been, for which I am profoundly grateful.All the dialog after the final battle should have been dropped. Algren survives, comes into the throne room, hands over the sword in silence, and leaves. Close up of Tom Cruise's face as he walks down the stairs from the palace.THAT'S how to end that film.I thought the full battle scenes were largely underwhelming -- though some of the horse stunts were VERY impressive. Maybe it's because my eyes were drawn to some samurai extra near the back who, in the initial charge, falls flat on his back ten feet before he reaches the enemy lines for no apparent reason. His feet just went out from under him and he flops on his back and then very ungracefully staggers to his feet again. I mean, you know, it happens, sure -- but it definitely took me "out of the moment" if you know what I mean.I thought the performances were excellent (especially the younger kid and the grouchy swordmaster who smacks Cruise around in the rain) and the certainly the cinematography was lovely.The effects were NOT up to snuff and the CGI work especially stood out as poorly done. Peter Jackson has spoiled us all.The swordfighting looked good but wasn't filmed in such a way that you could really watch what was happening (on purpose and effectively so, I hasten to add). Plus the film followed one of my pet peeves of movie shorthand -- "The Hero Learns a Skill By Trying It Three Times" -- you see Cruise get his butt whupped, then you see him line up to try sparring with the samurai gang, and then you see him one-on-one-ing it with grouchy swordmaster, and now he's learned it! Hurrah!Okay, it's not an easy thing to do, but that particular implementation has always irritated me.I thought the ninja fight scene was not very well handled -- I didn't get a good sense of the fight itself and there just seemed to be a whole bunch of faceless bad guys with no particular skill or objectives that I knew about. So watching them die wasn't particularly exciting. But a great action director Zwick is not.Boy, Katsumoto sure spoke good English. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I didn't see too much politicisation -- but then I'm neither American nor Japanese so perhaps I might have.Am I the only one who thought it was eerie how much the kid playing Meiji actually LOOKED like Meiji?</blockquote>

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