Cinema of Swords
A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)
By Lawrence Ellsworth
Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to the Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.
This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.
If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, do us both a favor and ask about it wherever you do your book shopping.)
Last and Twilight Samurai
The long rule of Japan’s samurai warrior class came to an end in the 19th century in blood and melodrama, so it’s a fruitful setting for historical adventures. It’s been romanticized by movie industries both eastern and western, which often leads to fine entertainment while glossing over certain aspects of history. All the really clear-eyed appraisals of the era come from the arthouse end of the Japanese film business, and it’s made for some wonderful cinema. This week we’ve got striking examples of movies about the end of the samurai from both ends of the spectrum.
The Last Samurai
Rating: ****
Origin: USA/Japan/New Zealand, 2003
Director: Edward Zwick
Source: Warner Bros. DVD
This is a perfectly fine action movie—but as history, it’s horsefeathers. However, we’ll deal with the horsefeathers separately below, so you can easily skip that part.
The basic plot is simple enough: In 1876, Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), a former officer in Custer’s 7th Cavalry, is drinking himself to death from guilt over his participation in U.S. Army massacres of Native Americans, when he’s hired by his former commanding officer to go to Japan to teach Imperial troops about modern 19th-century warfare. They’re being trained with the latest firearms to fight a small army of rebel samurai, who have rejected the country’s modernization and fight with the ancient weapons of sword and bow, demanding a return to samurai rule. The rebel leader is Lord Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), a noble and compassionate warrior who embodies the Way of Bushido—the good parts, anyway.
Algren is ordered to lead his partly trained commoner conscripts against the samurai before they are ready; they’re massacred by the warrior caste and Algren, after an epic fight on the battlefield, is taken prisoner. The samurai withdraw to the north for the winter, where Algren is quartered with Lady Taka (Koyuki), whose husband he killed in the battle. But Algren, though initially aloof, disdaining and disdained by the samurai, learns to admire their skills and discipline, and is befriended by Katsumoto. By the time the snow melts in the passes and the war resumes, Algren has gone over to the side of the samurai. But history is against them, and faced with greater numbers armed with howitzers and gatling guns, the honorable samurai are doomed to defeat.
This story isn’t deep, but the characters are appealing and well written, and Algren, Katsumoto, and Taka learn from each other and grow in a satisfying if predictable fashion. The film is beautifully shot, New Zealand standing in nicely for northern Japan, and the pacing is good, holding your attention even through the slower parts. The action is definitely the movie’s strong point, with well-staged sword duels, a night attack by ninja, and a considerable set-piece battle at the end, flawed only in that it might be a little overlong in the slo-mo slaughter department. There’s no whitewashing of the cast, with Asian actors performing all the Japanese roles, something of a breakthrough for a Hollywood epic. And, wow, do those armored samurai look great.
Now for the aforementioned horsefeathers. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the history of the end of samurai rule in Japan has been falsified here, but it sure as hell has been super simplified. The formula of bad westernized capitalists versus good noble traditional warriors dumbs history down for Hollywood audiences to give the film emotional resonance while overlooking inconvenient facts about samurai culture. Gazing soulfully into the distance, Katsumoto says, “For 900 years, my ancestors have protected our people”—sure, the samurai protected their people’s heads right off their necks at the first sign of disobedience. Capitalism, too, has its ugly and oppressive side, but in Japan it raised the peasants out of poverty and gave them one of the highest standards of living on the planet.
Worse, the persecuted-for-honor victimhood of the samurai here stinks of the glorified martyrdom of Braveheart (1995), a seductive appeal as powerful as it is pernicious. The samurai had undeniable virtues worthy of admiration, but stay in school, kids, and keep away from death cults. Find your heroism elsewhere.
The Twilight Samurai
Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 2002
Director: Yoji Yamada
Source: Tartan Cinema DVD
This is a jidaigeki, or historical drama, rather than a chambara swordplay adventure, but wow, is it good—and there are two sword duels at pivotal points in the story, so it’s not just two hours of talking heads.
Not that you’ll mind, with a story as strong as this one. Set in the mid-19th century, when the samurai era was waning, it’s about Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada), a minor bureaucrat in a remote samurai clan, a debt-ridden widower with two young daughters and a senile mother trying to get by despite his family’s difficult circumstances. In his clan, Seibei has a few friends of higher rank, but most of the other samurai refer to him derisively as “Twilight” because at the end of every workday, he rushes home to his daughters.
One of Seibei’s higher ranking friends had arranged a marriage for the friend’s sister, Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa) to a clan officer, Koda, who turned out to be a drunken lout and wife-beater; a divorce was pushed through, but Koda is a bully who continues to harass Tomoe and challenges the brother to a duel. The clan has forbidden dueling and the penalty is death, but Seibei, who has been friends with Tomoe when both were children, steps in to take his friend’s place. To avoid killing his opponent, Seibei dares to fight him with no more than a wooden short sword—but he’d trained with a short-sword master in his youth and is able to defeat Koda without killing him in an impressively staged fight.
Tomoe is grateful and begins helping out with Seibei’s daughters, and the two commence a sort of slow-motion romance, though Seibei feels himself unworthy. Then the clan’s lord suddenly dies, throwing the clan into a succession crisis; the supporters of the losing side are ordered to commit seppuku, but one of them, Zenemon Yogo (what a great name), refuses and kills the officer sent to arrest him. Yogo is considered the best swordsman in the clan, but word of Seibei’s defeat of Koda has gotten around, and he is ordered by his superiors to take on Yogo—and kill him.
In the last hours before Seibei must go after Yogo, everyone reveals their true feelings, and the stakes of the combat are suddenly very high. But when Seibei gets to Yogo’s house, the renegade invites him in to talk rather than fight, and the result is a wonderful scene as the pair of fated antagonists tell each other their troubles: it’s gripping, tense, emotional, and can end only in tragedy for one or both. It’s no wonder The Twilight Samurai swept the Japanese Academy Awards in 2003, because it’s close to a masterpiece.
Next Week: Xiphos and Bucephalus (Five Times Fast), the madness of Troy and Alexander. Don’t miss it!
About Lawrence Ellsworth
Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.
My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Book 8, Shadow of the Bastille, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform, and Book 9, The Man in the Iron Mask, is forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.
As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and recently I returned to D&D as Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.