Dances With Swords

This scathing review of The Last Samurai pretty much sums up what was obvious to me from watching the two-minute trailer last week.

Basically what Zwick has done is to take Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves" and insert it into the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, with a samurai clan in the role of an Indian tribe. Hmmm, I don't think so. Costner evoked all of Native American culture; the survival of a whole people was at peril. It was a culture war, not a class war. But the samurai, after all, were but a small part of Japan; they represented, by the 19th century, obstructivist, regressive values. They really can't, or shouldn't, be sentimentalized.

That doesn't stop Zwick. Nothing stops Zwick. He's like General MacArthur returning. He marches through everything, immune to subtlety, nuance, sense of appropriateness. So he's got Tom Cruise, as earnest and hopeless as the day is long, as both Toshiro Mifune and Kevin Costner. And to make this travesty worse, you can feel the handsome little guy "acting" with every fiber of his being. It's kind of unsettling. He resembles Sean Penn in "I Am Sam," except he seems to be shouting "I am Samurai." His face is a perpetual mask of scorn, his body a knot of anxiety, his eyes cranked down to laser glare. He's a poster boy for the concept of "trying too hard." He's not a hero, he's the guy at the party who's so intense you want him to stay away.

Ouch. But it gets worse:

Almost instantly you can see the agenda. First, Zwick insists on stale stereotyping that all but destroys the film. He expresses Algren's moral contamination by associating him with a hated modern institution, a gun company. But at the time, Connecticut's gun valley was something like today's Silicon Valley, part of that holy dream of manifest destiny. The opprobrium that visited the gun business didn't arrive until well into the next century.

And the conclusion really stings:

In the end, Katsumoto, with Algren by his side, faces a battle with newly industrialized forces. This is set up to showcase the uniquely Japanese value called "The Nobility of Failure," to quote the title of Ivan Morris's book on the subject, evidently an inspiration to Zwick. In the last battle of "The Last Samurai," Katsumoto, Algren and a few hundred others ride into Gatling guns. We're supposed to feel, I don't know, sorry for them, because their little con game is over, because Japan is achieving a central government and a unification under national leadership, along with other little things included in the bargain like education, medicine, and so forth.

This movie thinks that's terrible; it yearns for a medieval country to remain medieval. What sane person could buy into such absurdity? "The Last Samurai" stands for the Banality of Failure.

Read the whole thing, as there's lots more where that came from.

This is really too bad. I thought that Zwick did a reasonably good job in Glory, even though that movie was also nearly undone by Denzel Washington's performance as a decidedly 1980's-type angry black man. The visuals in the trailer for The Last Samurai made me hope that it would be good.

But the implications of the story line are too painfully obvious. The samurai rebels of the Meiji Restoration were Japan's equivalent of the dead-enders and the Islamists that we see in Iraq, today; utterly opposed to modernity and the creation of the types of civic institutions that allow progress and, hopefully, democracy to flourish, they apparently hoped to drag society backward into a time when they acted with impunity over the lives of ordinary citizens.

On the other hand, this should not be suprising in today's political climate. As we have seen since September 11, liberals tend to admire the savagery of primitive foreign cultures. From the dead-enders in Iraq to the Palestinian suicide bombers, in the liberal world, savagery is a noble thing, so long as the savagery isn't being committed by American soldiers or policemen.

UPDATE: This reviewer sees the same problem.

Comments

[Jon]

brava! what a review.....it's like you watched the damn movie with me and were listening to my own personal commentary. i didn't mind the fact that it such a rip off of DWW but TC just totally ruined the film with his pretty boy arrogance and 'I am an actor' demeanor. Jesse Ventura could've played the part with true subtlety and finesse in comparison.
aaarrrgggghhh!!!

script needed serious work too. get rid of billy what'sis'face and give ken more lines.

if TC is gonna bother making more films he might as well show his ass or have a gratuitous love making scene 'cause that's what most people are really paying to see him do.
again.....aaarrrggghh!

[Peter]

The central assumptions of the movie are all false: The 1877 rebels used guns, not swords. Both sides were led by samurai and wanted to maintain them as a privelaged class -- although the rebellion itself showed why this idea was impractical. Saigo was dissatified with the government mainly because it wouldn't let him build a modern army and use it to invade Korea. He favored and an absolute monarchy and class privelege at home, military aggression abroad. Hollywood is glorifying a fascist.