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Seven Samurai




Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is certainly an epic classic that inspired so many filmmakers. But does it really need to be 3 and a half hours long? At first, I thought I would not enjoy this movie. I thought it would be boring and confusing. But I was wrong. The story is very simple. A town keeps being attacked by bandits so they hire samurai to help protect them. It was that simple. So, it was easy to enjoy the story because it was so simple. And this is basically the japanese version of The Avengers, before The Avengers. There's an old man who assembles a team of expert killers and they protect people from the evils trying to invade their lives. Sounds familiar right? It's because just about every action movie with a huge cast (like The Expendables) borrowed from this movie.

I quite enjoyed it for the most part, and it was much funnier than i expected it to be. There was a lot of comic relief in this movie, maybe a little too much. Instead of building character development and getting to know the characters better, there was a lot of goofing around scenes and comic relief. We get it, the townpeople are starting to like the samurai. I just wish I knew the characters better by the end, because I was very intrigued by certain characters. You would think that you would know the characters a little too well by the end of the movie, seeing as it is 3 hours and 27 minutes long, but sadly you don't. And there are plot points that are just dropped and never picked up again. When a samurai finds a bunch of old samurai armor, the other samurais are angry and sad for a little bit, but then move on and don't really speak of it again. I wanted to know more about that, but oh well.

The movie was very well made and the camera work was great, not to mention, some of the first slow motion scenes put to film. I was really enjoying this film for about an hour and a half and was thinking "this movie is really fun" but then there were 2 hours of comic relief and the story not going anywhere and then a sudden bandit attack. It seemed strange. The final battle scenes are amazing though, and there is a lot of suspense. And the final line of the movie is haunting. This was a good movie, and I can see why it is a classic, but it was way too long, and didn't expand upon the parts of the story that interested me most.


3.4/5