Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

The Last Samurai (2003)

Director: Edward Zwick

Average user rating
2 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Sick to the soul - or soused, at any rate - Capt Nathan Algren (Cruise) is selling his Wild West exploits for public amusement when he's approached by representatives of Japan's Emperor Meiji. The Emperor's reformist pursuit of international trade has outraged traditional isolationists. A samurai rebellion led by the charismatic Katsumoto (Watanabe) threatens the court; the Emperor will pay Algren handsomely to train a new infantry division and quell the threat. But when Algren is wounded and captured by the samurai, his allegiances shift. Competently mounted in its studiedly immersive, elongated way, Zwick's earnest costume epic dresses a knee-jerk, reactionary sensibility in exotic garb. Set about a dozen years after Cold Mountain and its true forebear, Dances with Wolves, it affects a superficially similar disaffection with the US Civil War (this from the director of Glory), but far from being all warred out, Algren is bursting for a fight. Any fight. Going native under the care of the samurai, Algren finds true cause in the fascistic feudalism of duty, discipline and bushido, 'the way of the warrior'. The ultimate expression of this code is ritual suicide - seppuku - and that's the 'glory' to which Zwick and his collaborators thrill, engineering a hopeless battle between the outnumbered rebels (with arrows and swords) and a faceless imperial army armed with heavy artillery and machine guns. Zwick draws confused parallels with Custer at the Little Bighorn and the Spartans at Thermopylae, but you could draw a less complacent analogy: Algren's closest contemporary counterpart must be John Walker Lind, the American Taliban.

Author: TCh 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

User reviews of this film

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Edward Zwick

Producer: Marshall Herskovitz, Edward Zwick, Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner, Scott Kroopf, Tom Engelman

Cast: Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe, Timothy Spall, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Hiroyuki Sanada, Masato Harada, Koyuki, William Atherton, Shun Sugata, Shin Koyamada, Scott Wilson, Shichinosuke Nakamura full cast

Genre(s): Period/Swashbucklers

Duration: 154 mins

Related articles


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.