Seven Samurai?

Question

Has anyone seen this movie?
What do you think about it?

Answer 1

Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Shichinin no samurai?) is a 1954 movie co-written, edited and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film takes place in the war-torn Japan of the early 16th century (specifically, before the Sengoku period ended and Japan was unified by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1582). It follows the story of a village of farmers that hire seven masterless samurai warriors to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.

Seven Samurai is usually regarded as one of the greatest films ever made and is also one of a select few Japanese films to become widely known in the West, and is the subject of both popular and critical acclaim; it consistently ranks in the top ten movies on the IMDb Top 250 List and was voted onto Sight & Sound's list of the ten greatest films of all time in 1982 and 1992, and it remains on the director's top ten films in the 2002 poll.

At the start of the film, a village of Japanese farmers are under threat of attack by a gang of 'forty' marauding bandits. Desperate to rid themselves of the threat, they confer amongst themselves trying to think of a solution. In turmoil they go to the village elder who tells them to go find samurai to defend the village, but some are skeptical, knowing that samurai are expensive to enlist and are attractive to young farm women. The elder tells them to find "hungry samurai". They go into the city to find samurai but initially, they are unsuccessful, being turned away by samurai because they cannot offer any pay other than rice. However, they are eventually able to convince Kambei, an aging and generally kind samurai, to help them. Kambei goes around the city and eventually finds five other samurai (Ronin) to fight with him, plus a sixth tag-along, Kikuchiyo, a pseudo-samurai looking for excitement. So, the seven are:

Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura) — the leader
Katsushiro Okamoto (Isao Kimura) — the young samurai who wants to be Kambei's disciple
Gorobei Katayama (Yoshio Inaba) — a skilled samurai whom Kambei adopts as his deputy
Shichiroji (Daisuke Kato) — an old comrade of Kambei reunited with his friend
Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi) — a serious, stone-faced samurai who is a supremely skilled swordsman
Heihachi Hayashida (Minoru Chiaki) — an amiable samurai, of lesser skill, but who retains good cheer in the face of adversity
Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) — a would-be samurai, in fact a farmer's son, who eventually proves his worth to the others and defends the actions of the villagers to the other samurai.

The story unfolds gradually, and a chemistry develops between the villagers and their helpers. To persuade the samurai to help them, the villagers have to act unintelligent and impoverished. Later, however, the samurai discover that the villagers have murdered and robbed fleeing samurai in the past. The samurai contemplate a massacre of the village, and the hitherto clownish samurai Kikuchiyo is forced to demonstrate his intelligence and his roots by passionately explaining the hardships faced by villagers as they are constantly harassed and pressured by the samurai class as a whole. The blazing hatred of the samurai is thus pacified into humility. Soon afterwards, when the samurai learn that they were getting all the best food while the peasants were subsisting on inferior supplies, they share their food with the more needy of their employers.

The middle of the film follows preparations for the defense of the village. Fortifications are built, and a raid is made on the bandit stronghold (resulting in the death of Heihachi by gunfire), villagers are trained in basic fighting techniques, and Katsushiro, the youngest samurai, begins a love affair with the daughter of one of the villagers who had been forced to masquerade as a boy. The film has an intermission at this point.

The second half of the film chronicles the battle between the samurai, teamed with the villager militia, and the bandits. The bandits are confounded by the fortifications put in place by the samurai, and several are killed attempting to scale the defences or cross moats. However, in addition to having a superior number of trained fighters, the attackers possess three guns, and are thus able to hold their own. In fact, all four samurai who die in the course of the film are killed by gunfire. This "unfair" means of killing the samurai may contribute to the sense of the nobility of the samurai in comparison to the depravity of the bandits. The guns also provide a plot device in that much of the samurai's actions revolve around capturing or disabling the guns.

During the night of siege, Katsushiro's affair is revealed, and after an initial uproar, his amorous adventures provide some much needed comic relief to the embattled militia.

Apart from defence, the initial strategy of the samurai is to allow the bandits to enter a gap in the fortifications one at a time through the use of a closing "wall" of spears, and to then kill the lone enemy. This is repeated several times with much success, although more than one bandit manages to enter the village several times. Eventually the samurai decide that the villagers will soon become too exhausted to fight and instruct them to allow the last 13 bandits in at once while the defenders are still battle-ready. In the ensuing confrontation, Kyuzo is killed by gunfire, enraging Kikuchiyo who bravely pursues his attacker and kills him, finally proving his worth as a samurai, but he is also killed by gunfire. However, the battle is ultimately won for the villagers.

The symbolism involving the way in which the samurai die (by enemy gunfire, in contrast to their own use of swords and arrows) is particularly relevant. The technology of the matchlock rifles that were used during the Sengoku period depicted in the film would have most likely been imported from the Portugese Namban, thus we see the Japanese warrior brought down by a foreign technology, much in the same way that the American atomic bombs brought the fall of Japan in 1945. In the case of Kikuchiyo (a dreamer who ultimately finds bravery), and Kyuzo (a skilled warrior) it may emphasize the folly of trying to develop old skills in the modern world where death can be dealt instantly by relatively unskilled people, as long as they have weapons like guns. The two atomic bombs that forced the Japanese to surrender and killed so many civilians are a persistent shadow in Kurasowa's oeuvre. It is worth noting that guns of this period probably would not have functioned well in a rain storm, although the film may be referencing aspects of the Battle of Nagashino and, of course, presaging Akira's film Kagemusha.

The warrior's lot: The three surviving samurai, Kambei, Katsushiro, and Shichiroji are left to observe the villagers' happily planting the next rice crop, and to reflect that they, the samurai, have not triumphed for though they have won the battle for the farmers, they have lost their friends with little to show for it. This melancholic observation contrasts with the singing and joy of the villagers, whose figuratively life-sustaining work has prevailed over war and left all warriors as the defeated party.
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Innovations

According to Michael Jeck's DVD commentary, Seven Samurai was among the first films to use the now-common plot element of the recruiting and gathering of heroes into a team to accomplish a specific goal, a device used in later films such as Ocean's Eleven (and also a common plot device in role-playing game adventures). Film critic Roger Ebert mentioned in his review that the sequence introducing the leader Kambei (in which the samurai shaves off his symbolic hairstyle in order to pose as a priest to rescue a boy from a kidnapper) could be the origin of the practice, now common in action movies, of introducing the main hero with an undertaking unrelated to the main plot. Other plot devices such as the reluctant hero, romance between a local girl and the youngest hero, and the nervousness of the common citizenry had appeared in other films before this but were combined together in this film. Its use of such cinematographic elements as slow motion and panning battle shots made it a movie that would influence cinema worldwide.

Legacy

The single largest undertaking by a Japanese filmmaker at the time, Seven Samurai was a technical and creative watershed that became Japan's highest-grossing movie and set a new standard for the industry. The film was also among the first to use slow-motion prominently, as when Kyuzo slays an enemy who falls (in slow-motion) to the ground, dead. Its influence can be most strongly felt in the western The Magnificent Seven, a film specifically adapted from Seven Samurai. Director John Sturges took Seven Samurai and updated it to the Old West, with the Samurai replaced with cowboys. Many of The Magnificent Seven's scenes mirror those of Seven Samurai in most details, and the final line of dialogue is nearly identical: "The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose."

Battle Beyond the Stars and Dikij vostok, and the Pixar film A Bug's Life also show Seven Samurai's influence.[citation needed] Computer games, as well, have paid homage to the film, where the seven Dark Jedi in Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II are strongly modeled upon the samurai seen in the movie.[citation needed] In 2004, Kurosawa's estate approved the production of an anime remake of the film, called Samurai 7, produced by GONZO, which provided an alternate steampunk-themed retelling of the classic story. Finally, Star Trek: Insurrection puts a new spin on the tale, with an "away team" of seven crewmates defending the village of "The Baku" against the villainous "Sona".

Throne of Darkness, by Click Entertainment, is a Japanese feudal-era themed role-playing game. The player controls a team of seven samurai against a demonic warlord and his army.

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Answer 2

I think it's Kurosawa's best film. It holds up very well being from 1954. It's considered one of the all time greats. It was a big influence on Lucas, Speilberg and other top directors. It was remade in the US as a western, The Magnificent Seven. Also it was made in to anime and shown on the Independent Film Channel in '06. The Criterion Collection released a deluxe edition of it on dvd in '06 and it was up for several dvd "release of the year" awards.

Answer 3

Phenominal movie!!! Long, black and white, and subtitled. But still among the best films ever. This movie was adapted to become the Magnificent Seven. It's a great film, I often recommend it to people that like westerns, or action flicks, or movies about the few against the many.

Answer 4

For sheer spectacle and excitement - The wonderful Seven yet for being basically a astounding piece of cinema - The Seven Samurai. thankfully the final public of the remakes of Kurosawa action pictures were tremendous action pictures,

Answer 5

I'm not aware of a newer film out. I've only seen the ages-old monochrome one, and it had subtitles. It was quite a wonderful movie though. Definitely strait from Japan.