director
Edward Zwick
screenwriters
John Logan
Marshall Herskovitz
Edward Zwick
producers
Tom Cruise
Tom Engelman
Marshall Herskovitz
Scott Kroopf
Paula Wagner
Edward Zwick
cinematographer
John Toll
music
Hans Zimmer
editor
Steven Rosenblum
cast
Tom Cruise (Nathan Algren)
Ken Watanabe (Katsumoto)
Koyuki (Taka)
Timothy Spall (Simon Graham)
William Atherton (Winchester Rep)
Billy Connolly (Zebulon Gant)
Tony Goldwyn (Col. Bagley)
Masato Harada (Omura)
Shichinosuke Nakamura (Emperor Meiji)
Togo Igawa (General Hasegawa)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 145m
u.s.
release: December 5,
2003
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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Bearded and long-haired, Tom
Cruise in The Last Samurai is a movie star's egocentric
dream of noble machismo -- the white man who enters a foreign
culture, an ancient warrior class, and proves himself worthy.
It's typical of Hollywood that Cruise has been chosen to play
the lead in a heavily fictionalized account of the samurai rebellion
led by Japanese hero Takamori Saigo in 1877. In real life, very
needless to say, there was no disgruntled Civil War captain named
Nathan Algren (Cruise), who, captured by samurai forces, learned
to love the nobility and elegance of their ways. A significant
piece of Japanese history takes a back seat to the spiritual
reawakening of Tom Cruise.
I suppose Dances with Wolves
(to which this movie owes more than to, dare I say it, The
Seven Samurai) was similarly dishonest; but that was a guilty
white dream of atonement for the atrocities perpetrated on Native
Americans, and Kevin Costner was helping to defend an entire
people, not a class of once-elite warriors who'd been part of
an oppressive hierarchy. Some of us went along with Costner's
daydream, self-aggrandizing as it sometimes was, because it reflected
a genuine curiosity about an extinguished way of life. Here,
though, the bitter Algren has flashbacks to his own genocidal
rampages under Custer; he drinks a lot and has an air of self-disgust
over what he did and saw, and he's Tom Cruise, so we're supposed
to forgive him.
Hired by the Japanese to train
an army to destroy the rebellious samurai -- who resist the modernization
of the military and the nation -- Algren, leading a bunch of
shaky recruits, goes down, but not without a fight. The leader
of the samurai, Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), sees how fiercely Algren
defends himself (to point up Algren's superhuman ferocity, director
Edward Zwick -- never one for subtlety -- zeroes in on a flagpole
Algren uses to hold off his attackers, the flag emblazoned with
a growling tiger) and orders him taken alive. Back at samurai
headquarters, Algren is nursed back to health by the widow (played
by the model Koyuki) of one of the samurai he killed.
Guilt over battle prowess rubs
elbows confusingly with pride in it. According to the Dances
with Wolves template, Algren should be content to live among
the wise and noble people in the sanctity of nature, and absent
himself from the violence of his past. But these are samurai;
making war is what they do. Since they won't adopt modern
tactics like guns or cannons, Algren is of little help to them
other than being one more guy with a sword. He becomes proficient
at swordsmanship, until even the more disdainful of the samurai
grudgingly allow that this one has potential.
What is the theme -- to say
nothing of the point -- of this lumbering if strikingly photographed
(by John Toll) mini-epic? Edward Zwick seems smitten with the
paradoxes and confusions of war or military action, as in Legends
of the Fall, The Siege, Courage Under Fire,
and his best film, Glory (which Zwick cribs from here
when Cruise forces a jittery recruit to load and fire to prove
that his army isn't ready, just like Matthew Broderick firing
his pistol right next to a black soldier as he tries to
load and fire). I can't really work out how Zwick feels about
war from film to film, though in this movie it's certainly useful
as a violent panorama against which manhood is tested and proven.
The real point of the film seems to be the poster image of a
battle-ready Tom Cruise waving a sword and all decked out in
gleaming red-and-black samurai armor.
Finally, forgive me, but why
are we supposed to care about the extinction of the samurai way?
The dying tradition here is that of men born into a warrior class
that killed according to the wishes of their masters. (Japanese
peasants, who were sometimes beheaded for having offended a samurai,
probably had a far less romantic view of the class.) Whose idea
was it to deliver a holiday blockbuster whose message is that
it's okay to kill as long as you kill with dignity? The Last
Samurai glorifies war as a necessary way of life. It's not
a way of life I'm interested in putting on a pedestal, thanks.
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