As a modern day Samurai, I have some problems with this film

Today, we introduce a new feature that I like to call: Seeing the Movies I’d Always Meant to See. Or SMAMS if you prefer. (Or not. Perhaps a rebranding is due in the next quarter.) It takes a certain kind of movie to make this list—I’ve always meant to see Young Frankenstein, but that’s not quite what we’re talking about here. These are the epics, the feel-bads; the Schindler’s Lists, Mystic Rivers, Seventh Seals; the ones you check out at Blockbuster and think about for three seconds before renting You Got Served instead. The plan is for this feature to show up every other Wednesday. There’s going to be suffering involved here, for me and you, so doing this weekly would be a bit too much to ask.

I hadn’t seen Seven Samurai until today, despite the fact that I’ve owned since October. I also haven’t seen The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, or any of the other homages or remakes (although if it’s any consolation I have seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Seven Rides for Seven Brothers.) The story begins with a small group of farmers who discover that marauders are planning to sack their village after the upcoming harvest. At the urging of the village elder, several of the farmers head to the city to hire samurai to defend them, and with only rice as payment the villages end up with a rag-tag group of ronin—some that are especially noble, others that are adventure-seeking, and one guy that’s just really hungry. The samurai return to the village where they set up defences, turn the spindly farmers into spindly farmers with sharp sticks, and eventually save the day. In the end, the human cost is comparatively larger for the samurai then for the farmers, and while the villagers sing a song of victory akin to the Ewok Jub-Jub Song at the end of Jedi, the samurai reflect on the graves of their fallen comrades.

Films snobs make this movie out to be more then it is. I’m not saying it isn’t great, and I’m not arguing that it doesn’t deserve its classic status, but to audiences that are familiar with this type of story, it isn’t an exciting movie. It’s three and a half hours long, and the climax of the film—the marauders’ siege—takes three nights to unfold. This is not a thrill ride, folks. But for some reason you get people like the critic at Criterion saying: “An audacious use of slow motion in the sword fight scenes of chapters four and seven give them a highly sophisticated dramatic charge. And that’s not to mention the climactic battle scenes, whose brilliant staging and heart-stopping pace rival the finest work of Griffith, Gance, and Eisenstein.” Heart-stopping? Not so much. And the ‘action rivals’ he name-drops all died in the goddamn forties. Apparently that’s as good as it gets; when it comes to pace and staging no one has topped the charge of the clan in Birth of the Nation.

Then over at imdb there’s a faux Ebert who gushes: “Each of [the movie’s] characters is extraordinarily realized; each has his or her own arc, his or her own vital part to play in the film's slow progression towards its dramatic finale.” Again, totally untrue. Of the seven samurai, there are admittedly three developed characters: Kambei, the old but battle-wise leader; Kikuchiyo, the orphan son of a farmer who only masquerades as a samurai; and Katsushiro, the youngest of the seven, who falls for one of farmers’ daughters and is also quite likely in love with one of the warriors. But after that, the rest are all single trait characters: there’s Stoic Samurai, Jovial Samurai, Old Friend of the Main Samurai Samurai, and Samurai Who Likes to Cut Wood. Seriously.

All other points for the movie are true. It is the prototype for the modern action movie, it is rich with emotion, and the story is patiently told and fully realized. But part of the problem is that it is the action movie template, which means that we’ve seen this movie done better a piece at a time in a thousand different films. I reiterate: great, should be seen, restored, celebrated, all that, but it’s no Casablanca; it’s no Godfather. It’s not perfect. There’s actually a ten minute block of it that makes no sense to me whatsoever. Three of the samurai find the marauders’ hide out—a group of shoddy huts. Everyone inside is asleep, so the samurais decide they will burn the huts and kill the men as they flee past. So they set the huts alight, and they watch, but then for some reason when the marauders wake and flee in a panic, the samurais don’t kill them. Instead they laugh. And boot a few in the arse. And shove a few into the mud. Why? Hard as I’ve tried, I can’t imagine. Then my absolute favourite part follows: one of the farmers tries to save his wife from a burning hut and Samurai Who Likes to Cut Wood tries to restrain him from dying in the fire. But the man won’t be stopped. The farmer frees himself from the samurai, shoves him roughly to the ground—and then the samurai dies. I swear to God. I played it back four times to make sure I didn’t miss a stabbing, or a gunshot, or a heart punch. Nothing. A rough shove to the ground is enough to kill both Burgess Meredith in Rocky III and one of the seven samurai.

Although I haven’t seen it yet, I expect I’ll have the same feelings about Rashomon—that it’s more renowned for creating a type of storytelling then for being as effective now as when it was released.

Tune in next time when I discuss the artistic merits of The Five Deadly Venoms.