SPOILERS, of course. I don't want to tell you what you should or should not see. This opinion is intended more for someone who's seen the film and wonders what others thought about it....

First off, "The Last Samurai" is obviously based on events in the last years of Saigo Takamori's life, the beginning of a period of enlightenment and cultural achievement that would end in atrocities committed in the name of the Emperor of Japan, and the horror of atomic warfare. In the film, the last samurai is called "Katsumoto", perhaps from the names of two other heroes of the Meiji Restoration, Sakamoto Ryoma and Katsu Kaishu.

Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren, who could easily be semi-historical, and whose initial placement in Japan is quite plausible. Algren is tormented by recurrent flashbacks to his reluctant participation in the wholesale killing of Native American women and children under the command of one brainless Col. Bagley, (played by Tony Goldwyn), a pointless character. But perhaps Col. Bagley is not completely pointless--after all, he does tell us, repeatedly, how the Indian Wars are analogous to the imminent extinction of the samurai and all they stand for by a Westernized Japanese Army. He also reminds us, (over and over again), how reluctant Algren was to murder innocent Indians. If, as some have suggested, this is supposed to be "Dances with Wolves in Japan", the American campaigns against Indians are more clearly analogous to the plight of Japan's aboriginal people, the Ainu, who have struggled against eradication since prehistoric times, with bows and arrows against steel sword technology. In fact, the first samurai often earned fame by their slaughter of these aborigines.

Unfortunately, in "The Last Samurai", we are apparently supposed to accept that Saigo Takamori is being swapped out of his own story to give Cruise's character a central place in a fictional narrative. This is made all the more ridiculous by a straight-ahead historical portrayal of the Meiji Emperor himself, Mutsuhito. The Meiji Emperor may have been as ineffectual as the film suggests--and I would have welcomed an examination of that weakness--but the incidental portrayal of a weak character is no help at all. (Besides, there is at least some evidence that imperial restraint was not his only virtue.)

It's difficult to watch this film, aching for a glance of the momentous events occurring everywhere in Japan at this time. The year is 1876, less than a decade after the Meiji Restoration; Tokyo has only just become the capital; in less than a generation, Japan will emerge on the world stage, with many tragic results. It is doubly painful to see that the scholars and statesmen who went abroad to study are all represented in this film by one slick, self-serving industrialist called Omura, (a villain played delectably by Harada Masato). What of the blossoming of art and science in the Taisho era? What, to mention only one, of Futabatei, who studied Turgenev and wrote Japan's first modern novel, Ukigumo, in 1886?

By obscuring a historical figure as indispensable to the story of the Meiji Restoration as Saigo Takamori, this romance manages to overlook a number of complicating factors. For example, we never learn that the man defeated in the Satsuma Rebellion, (the climactic battle portrayed in the film), had earlier left Tokyo largely due to the government's unwillingness to pursue the annexation of Korea for reasons of national security. (I wouldn't be too surprised if this kind of detail was purposely omitted to avoid alienating or fracturing the "Asian-American" demographic, of which, after all, Japanese-Americans comprise only 12%.)

The great tragedy is that all that was accomplished in the Meiji and Taisho eras was brought to naught by the adventures troublesome military leaders were eventually allowed to pursue overseas. The ancestral samurai did indeed reassert themselves, just as the Great Depression weakened the Taisho government, and they lead the country directly onto the nationalistic killing fields of the 20th century.

In the end, "The Last Samurai" seems to want to be taken seriously, but as historical fiction, it just skips too much history with its overly selective portrayal of one of the principle architects of the Meiji era. It just doesn't seem right when seminal events in Japanese history wind up looking like they were orchestrated to get Tom Cruise some action on the battlefield, and to give him a monologue to deliver to the Emperor himself.

P.S. The Japanese dialogue in "The Last Samurai" is a little better than in most Hollywood productions, but the subtitles are pretty boring, and not especially faithful. If you're familiar with the language, you may also miss the period speech and local dialects that enliven even the most uninspired historical dramas on Japanese TV.

That's it! Sorry for the history lesson!

Recommended:
No