The Last Samurai (review)

This is the Samurai ver­sion of The Great Escape. Why? Because it is basic­ally a real story with a token yank dropped in to make it sell in America.

The real Samurai in ques­tion was Saigo Takamori who was one of the key fig­ures in the Meiji Res­tor­a­tion. The rest of the story is basic­ally cor­rect, he did lead a rebel­lion against mod­ern­isers (who he helped to power a short time before) and pop­u­lar myth has it that he com­mit­ted sui­cide on the bat­tle­field after his final defeat. Although he didnt wear Samurai armour and the only way to tell the armies apart was a scraf worn on the arms. Also untrue is the dis­like of mod­ern weapons. As any­one knows, Japan had guns before almost every­one else!
Why the US has the need to add their own her­oes to the mix and steal from other cul­tures the vic­tor­ies of their great men, I have no idea. Still, this film does por­tray, and play to, the west­ern notion of the “Golden Age” of Samurai pop­u­lar amongst almost all west­ern youth. The part about Cruise learn­ing the secret to sword play, “too much mind”, is ham fistedly trans­lated and trans­posed but the key is cor­rect. For example in Kar­ate (Empty Hand) the thing that is empty is NOT the hand but the mind. This is a gen­eral concept Cruise grasps and given that was  already an exper­i­enced sabre fighter he could have picked up the Japan­ese style that quickly.