The Last Samurai - Oscar bait

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The Last Samurai has "big budget epic" and "Oscar" written all over it, which sets it up for high expectations and disappointment. While I wasn't blown away by it, it was very well done.

It's the story of a disaffected American cavalry captain (played by Tom Cruise), a veteran of the U.S. wars against the native nations, recruited in 1876, as Japan was developing a fascination with all things Western, to train the imperial army of Japan in the use of firearms and military tactics to put down a rebellion led by a Samurai who remains true to traditional weaponry and the warrior ethos that goes with them. As you can easily guess from the adverts, he goes "native".

Although the movie contains several scenes of combat, it's about more than just war. There's a principle in much Japanese art that treats the spaces between objects with as much importance as the objects themselves, and that applies here as well. The quiet scenes between the fights and the battles are at least a important, and give an added intesity to those scenes. Unlike so many movies where the combat scenes are just flashy demonstrations of martial arts and cinematic techniques, or just "pulse-pounding" action, I found myself intently watching these scenes, genuinely concerned about what was happening.

The casting of the movie had me a little bit worried, that this was going to be a story about the one white guy coming in to play messiah for a throng of brown people, and that the title of the movie would refer to him. But that was (mostly) not the case. Yes, Cruise's character plays the hero in several circumstances, and brings important strategy ideas to the rebellion, but he remains a lieutenant (in fact, not rank) to the real samurai, a Japanese warrior who "serves" the Emperor by opposing him military. The story is more about what Cruise learns from the Japanese, than vice versa. A bit of anglo-centrism, to be sure, but the parallel story is very much about Japan and its people, and not-all-that-good things they stood to learn from the Westerners (and forget what Cruise was learning).

The only criticism Nathan had was the occasional use of subtitles. He doesn't read very quickly, so he can never keep up with them, even when they're fairly brief, as they were here. Personally, I thought they used a bit more English than was realistic, but at least they didn't have scenes of Japanese people speaking privately to each other in English.