Why "The Last Samurai" Sucks

Perhaps I shouldn't have allowed my expectations to get so high. But I've been awaiting the arrival of a cool modern samurai film for years and I thought that one made with the combined muscle of Hollywood, Tom Cruise, and some respected Japanese actors had fantastic potential.

One issue I have with The Last Samurai is that I found myself laughing out loud at some of the horrible composites and CG extras. I know that this complaint may be a result of my experience with visual effects, but these were some of the worst offenses I've ever seen in such a large-budget Hollywood epic and I find it hard to believe that other people wouldn't be distracted by these things as well.

On a textual level, I found the film was very much like Dances With Wolves, only not as well-made. In some ways that's good: Kevin Costner's western epic was so finely crafted that people often confuse the quality of the picture with the theme of the film.

Both of these movies pretend to say one thing (namely that imperialism, manifest destiny, and "Westernization" are bad and should be regretted and questioned) but are actually reinforcing what they profess to eschew: the white male figure is not only the indomitable hero of these films, but he can also learn from the culture he oppresses/loves to such an extent that he can master their language and "out-Indian" the Indians or become an internal Samurai in spirit and an external one on the battlefield. He is in fact BETTER than his authentic teachers. It is Tarzan redux: forget the ancient indigenous population, it is the white man who can in one lifetime become "Lord of the Jungle" and protector of its treasures against the incursions of his race and the treachery of the stereotyped natives.

In The Last Samurai, as in Dances With Wolves, the White Man is not the real antagonist. That dishonorable role is saved for the "Other": The bloodthirsty Pawnee in the latter film, and Omura in the former. The 19th century American is merely a product of the age that created him and a logical link in the long chain that made America the great nation that it is today. He is only an ignorant force of nature, the natural evolution of human progress. The viewer may lament with nostalgia the cultures that were crushed in his wake, but they save their true spite for the two-dimensional non-white villains that betray and murder their own kind. There was nothing redeeming or real about the character of Omura. His incredibly stupid decisions were obviously story catalysts meant to move the plot along towards its conclusion.

In both pictures the hero with white skin (and gleaming teeth) learns everything he can from his new friends, incorporating their traditional ways with his modern practicality to become the ultimate warrior poet. One danger of this theme is the notion of reductionism: everything these ancient cultures have to offer can be mastered by a handsome white man in a few months. While they sadly but inevitably become extinct he lives on, an ennobled and wiser man for the experience. Another conclusion, even more scurrilous, is that it was mandatory for these cultures organized around honor, community, and heritage to die at some point because they cannot survive intact in the modern westernized world with its focus on the individual. We can look back with a romantic longing at their necessary passing, but we must remember that their "simplistic" mind-set was doomed by the theory of natural selection and that it couldn't have survived. Their rightful progeny, conceived with their more highly evolved Western replacement at the moment of death, is the modern post-war Japanese and the law-abiding, casino-operating Native American, along with the liberal-minded caucasian. What does this attitude say about the fate of the "Other" cultures that share our world today? What of the Australian Aborigine, the Native South American, the Native Andamanese? What of Tibet? Are we, and they, merely waiting for the inevitable moment when, as Ken Watanabe so eloquently puts it in the film, "it is their time?"

A by-product of this conclusion is the equally terrible notion that all the honorable and worthwhile Indians and Japanese were wiped out and that the only ones who survived were collaborators, realizing only too late the cultural apocolypse they helped bring about. The honor that the "good" Japanese lived by was the very trait marking them for certain death. In other words, Philip Sheridan's infamous phrase -- perpetuated countless times by Hollywood -- stating that "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" can now be applied to other westernized/modernized cultures: any samurai worth his salt died fighting for what he believed in. All the "good" Japanese are dead; only the weak leftovers survived. Thus, while pretending to celebrate Japanese culture, the filmmakers' theme belies their good intentions. I'm not saying that the director or even the writers are racist; I am merely stating that they write from the perspective of the oppressor and that a film that is not meant to inform but to make money must inevitably follow the old Hollywood money-making formula, along with its bigoted steretypes.

I lament the missed opportunity for a good big-budget samurai film -- in the meantime I return to my Kurosawa DVDs...and wait.