Salocin

The Last Samurai

Tom Cruise stars in this beautifully put together piece that follows the adventure of an American military advisor who travels to Japan to train an army so as to put down a small rebellion by "savages", captured by the Samurai warriors he confronts, he is shown a way of life and a code of honour that he finds easy to attach himself to, and which provides him with the calm and balance he needs to free himself from the demons of his past. The Last Samurai is a great movie in the action genre which will seduce you through its grandeur, its heart, and its illustration of nobility and strength.

The Last Samurai has received mixed reviews from around the world. I think I sense in some of the more negative commentary a certain anti-Tom Cruise vein which is fair only if you restrict your viewing to Days of Thunder and one or two other lapses. It is not for nothing that Mr. Cruise carries the flag of Hollywood, he has the clout to get the roles, and the acting prowess to carry them off.

While I'm sure words like "epic" and "majestic" can be fairly used to describe a film like this, I'd like to stay away from such words as they get overused, and then no longer mean what they should when The Lord of the Rings comes along and truly deserves them. The Last Samurai is a great film for other reasons. The one I will pick on - although it is certainly not the only one - is the depiction of the lifestyle of the Samurai.

While I am sure that it is filled with historical inaccuracies that the more pedantic among us will have a field day pointing out, the Samurai as they are depicted - fact or fiction - are awe-inspiring; for their morals, their absolutism, their compassion, their unwillingness to compromise those things that lie at the heart of their way of life. I found that the use of Lieutenant Commander Nathan Algren's captivity as a device works brilliantly to depict the balanced, noble and humble way of life followed by the Samurai of the movie, and that we are affected by his gradual conversion until, when he finally does it, we are also ready to embrace that way of life as our own - if only for the duration of the movie.

In the west, we live in contradictory times : In our modern, tolerant society, our boundaries shift and change as quickly as we can redefine them so as to always accept everyone's behaviour, dress and treatment of others as normal. Apart from those rules that are essential to society - anything goes. Simultaneously, at the other end of the scale, a proliferation of largely pointless contradictory rules make our lives a test of constant compliance and partial infringement. It is therefore incredibly refreshing to see a society where the rules of conduct and behaviour are coherent, consistent, understood and in support of a way of life. Where nobility and honour can co-exist with humility and service. It is not hard to see why a troubled soldier like Algren is so quick to embrace them. They seem to maintain with every breath they take, everything we've lost.

Watch this film, and you too will wish you had been there, swords at your waist, standing tall, with so much to defend.