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Seven Samurai
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
First off:
Holy **** do I feel stiff. And not the erection kinda stiff, just the ordinary haven't-moved-in-over-3-*******-HOURS kinda stiff.
There's complaint number one for ya: This movie is nearly 3 and half hours and it had no business being that long.
What happens? A villager eavesdrops on a bandit patrol and learns that their village will be raided at the end of the season and so ventures out to hire seven samurai which help organize the village and defeat the bandit threat. That's not a story that needs to be 3 hours.
To Seven Samurai's credit though, it manages to spend that time wisely building on it's characters and developing further setup without ever being too transparently expositional which means even though it was a wicked marathon of a movie, I at least never got bored or tuned out. It really just feels like a movie where the main script was exercised in it's entirety without any anecdotal scene edited out.
None of our many many characters are ever really very deep either. We have intimate moments with most of our main characters, but it's not as if development is ever taken very far beyond their archetypes. We MIGHT have been able to were there not so many characters, but because there are we end up filling time by briefly touching on only some of them (sadly, two of our seven samurai are practically indistinguishable from each other).
Still, what we get in terms of character development is significantly better than what we had with Battle Beyond the Stars. Battle Beyond the Stars was very quick with it's character introductions and very casual with it's character deaths so despite their unique qualities, there really isn't much of any reason to care.
Flipping it once again, at least BBTS didn't take an age to get where it's going. I usually give a movie 15 minutes to introduce it's main conflict and arc, but Seven Samurai takes literally twice that amount of time before "we need seven samurai" is ever mentioned. That's the length of a 30-minute TV show episode, and if this were a TV series the first episode would be extraordinarily underwhelming for all of what it accomplishes with it's screentime.
I guess what I'm saying here is there's a middle ground between Battle Beyond the Stars and Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai HAS it's development, but it could be sharply edited to include only the most crucial moments. Scenes we absolutely DO NOT NEED would include:
1.) The entire romantic subplot. Duh. Obviously. This plot goes nowhere, never resolves, and only exists to create conflict with a man who insists on disguising his daughter as a man to hide her from the fiendish samurai that would... rape her, I guess? Oh wait no, because if the dice fall right, the moons align, and just one of those seven samurai SO HAPPENS to have sex with her, she'll become damaged goods.
( -_-) Sssssweet.
At least the general reaction to this guy is upset and disgust, but it's misplaced in my opinion. For one, the response, "remember when you were younger" plainly disregards this guy's real issue by dismissing it as sex drive. For two, BRAINLESS PROMISCUITY is a pretty sickening character trait in general, so that's entirely worth criticizing. This female character doesn't have any personality to speak of, not like the guy who courts her and for all we're aware of they're only into each other for their looks. The vast majority of scenes involving them can literally be summed up as:
"I just noticed you were here."
"I'm going to stare suddenly and meaningfully at you."
"I take a step forward."
"I take another step forward."
Does she even have any lines beyond wimpering, cowering, and getting beaten by her father? I SURE DON'T REMEMBER. It doesn't help matters when the samurai excuse it as being predictable given that they all might die in the morning. Umm... WHAT?
By this point the samurai have already defeated MOST of the bandits primarily thanks to the villagers spearing them left and right. What reason do you have to believe you won't just MIGHT lose, but PROBABLY WILL lose? The odds were worse yesterday!
Also, why does the concept of getting stabbed or shot to death in the near future make you horny enough to stick your dick in the nearest wet towel that screams like a Japanese girl? THERE'S NOTHING THERE, SHE'S A BLOCK OF WOOD WITH A FACE, SHE'S FLATTER THAN FLAT STANLEY!
Last thoughts: It seems overacting body language is almost unavoidable in Japanese movies, I don't know why, it's probably something dragged kicking and screaming from stage plays, but at least it's relatively mild here with the main exception obviously being Kikuchiyo who's just generally portrayed to be childishly energetic.
At least we don't have the ruthlessly dead exposition that we got with Battle Beyond the Stars, which is an unfortunate result because what BBTS seemed to take away from Seven Samurai most was just the basic concept, when Seven Samurai's greatest strength is it's varied and thoughtful character interactions.
Admittedly BBTS presents it's story in a significantly more digestable manner, but the same story is told significantly better in Seven Samurai, even down to maintaining unpredictability with character deaths.
I do have one question, though: How did that first samurai die? Did he trip and crack his head or something? He sorta flops over. Was he shot? I DON'T KNOW.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
REWATCH UPDATE (4/21/25):
Reading back my review, I think most of my criticisms were on point.
Heihachi's death, that is, one of the samurai who barely has a presence in the movie, is definitely edited terribly.
The way it appears onscreen is that he's fighting with Rikichi and gets knocked over. At the moment he impacts the ground there's a gunshot sound effect and everybody acts like he just got shot.
But he didn't act like he got shot, he acted like he fell over and shot himself... except he doesn't have a gun. So was it just a dramatic sound effect for stabbing himself? For breaking his back? That's a pretty shitty way for any character to go, to randomly fall over and severe their spine so loudly it sounds like a gunshot.
It's ****ing BAD. There's no other way to put it, there's no defending it.
As I also mentioned, Manzo, the character whose daughter brainlessly romances the youngest of the samurai and is paranoid of exactly that, is the worst character in the entire movie. He's just an irredeemably possessive scumbag character, in what is already a trio of shitty characters.
Shino, the daughter, as already no personality, and NO, I literally cannot remember a single line of dialog she speaks throughout the entire movie. She communicates almost entirely through a deer-in-the-headlights stare.
The samurai, Isao (whose name I had to look up), is also just annoying, not just for causing this dumb romantic conflict but also for being the archetypal watery-eyed aspirational character who'd sooner burst into tears or profess their adoration for their nearest senpai than do anything of actual value.
These three characters almost entirely comprise the romantic subplot and dilemma which is not only irrational from a modern day perspective, but it doesn't even make any sense in-universe.
Isao is allegedly from a "samurai family", whereas Shino is from a "farmer family", and these represent two separate classes. Is it NOT in the interest of the farmers to marry into an upper class family? Isn't that the whole dream scenario in these medieval/feudal settings, that a peasant catches the eye of nobility and nobility commits the faux pas of bringing them into their family?
Like, I don't get any impression from Manzo that he has any love for his daughter, women in these movies are almost all treated as chattel, so shouldn't he be pleased that a samurai takes a liking to his daughter? I just don't get it.
Arguably worst of all, the early scenes where Manzo expresses fear to the other villagers that their daughters are under threat from the samurai... never comes up again. It is super late into the movie when they pull the "I called it, our daughters are sluts for samurai!" card, but nobody cares. It doesn't affect morale in any apparent way, it doesn't disturb the trust that's been established, nobody takes his side... it just didn't serve a purpose at the end of the day. So it was literally just a complete waste of time and had no impact on the rest of the story whatsoever.
It's not even clear that Isao even gets the girl in the end.
The runtime, as already stated, is still pretty awful. Yojimbo is basically half of Seven Samurai's runtime. It is just so long and it doesn't need to be that long, especially when they waste a bunch of it on this vacuous romantic bullshit and animal abuse.
It takes 1 hour to recruit the samurai,
1 hour to fortify and train the village,
and the last hour is the whole siege.
For at reason, if for no other, I have definitely changed my mind about Seven Samurai being better than Yojimbo.
The cinematography's not nearly as interesting in this movie and while the music feels much improved over Yojimbo, I noticed that character dialog frequently sounds muffled and the overall leveling makes some conversations barely audible.
This is less obvious if you're only paying attention to the subtitles, but if I had to listen to them speaking Japanese, I'd have to turn up the volume in some scenes.
I'm mostly just repeating myself this time around, but this time time around I'm going to be a bit harsher with my rating:
Final Verdict: [Okay]
Seven Samurai
Action Drama / Japanese / 1954
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
In Raven73's Star Wars: The Force Awakens thread, Iroquois referenced his own Basically Just thread, the first page of which contains the following exchange:
I haven't seen Seven Samurai (or any Akira Kurosawa film to be honest), however I read it was a major inspiration for Battle Beyond the Stars.
How righteously overhyped is it?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Originally Posted by Iroquois
Seven Samurai
Originally Posted by Gatsby
Basically just the first erection caused by good cinema for most beginning cinephiles
How righteously overhyped is it?
"Find hungry samurai. Even bears come down from the mountain when they're hungry."
First off:
Holy **** do I feel stiff. And not the erection kinda stiff, just the ordinary haven't-moved-in-over-3-*******-HOURS kinda stiff.
There's complaint number one for ya: This movie is nearly 3 and half hours and it had no business being that long.
What happens? A villager eavesdrops on a bandit patrol and learns that their village will be raided at the end of the season and so ventures out to hire seven samurai which help organize the village and defeat the bandit threat. That's not a story that needs to be 3 hours.
To Seven Samurai's credit though, it manages to spend that time wisely building on it's characters and developing further setup without ever being too transparently expositional which means even though it was a wicked marathon of a movie, I at least never got bored or tuned out. It really just feels like a movie where the main script was exercised in it's entirety without any anecdotal scene edited out.
None of our many many characters are ever really very deep either. We have intimate moments with most of our main characters, but it's not as if development is ever taken very far beyond their archetypes. We MIGHT have been able to were there not so many characters, but because there are we end up filling time by briefly touching on only some of them (sadly, two of our seven samurai are practically indistinguishable from each other).
Still, what we get in terms of character development is significantly better than what we had with Battle Beyond the Stars. Battle Beyond the Stars was very quick with it's character introductions and very casual with it's character deaths so despite their unique qualities, there really isn't much of any reason to care.
Flipping it once again, at least BBTS didn't take an age to get where it's going. I usually give a movie 15 minutes to introduce it's main conflict and arc, but Seven Samurai takes literally twice that amount of time before "we need seven samurai" is ever mentioned. That's the length of a 30-minute TV show episode, and if this were a TV series the first episode would be extraordinarily underwhelming for all of what it accomplishes with it's screentime.
I guess what I'm saying here is there's a middle ground between Battle Beyond the Stars and Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai HAS it's development, but it could be sharply edited to include only the most crucial moments. Scenes we absolutely DO NOT NEED would include:
1.) The entire romantic subplot. Duh. Obviously. This plot goes nowhere, never resolves, and only exists to create conflict with a man who insists on disguising his daughter as a man to hide her from the fiendish samurai that would... rape her, I guess? Oh wait no, because if the dice fall right, the moons align, and just one of those seven samurai SO HAPPENS to have sex with her, she'll become damaged goods.
( -_-) Sssssweet.
At least the general reaction to this guy is upset and disgust, but it's misplaced in my opinion. For one, the response, "remember when you were younger" plainly disregards this guy's real issue by dismissing it as sex drive. For two, BRAINLESS PROMISCUITY is a pretty sickening character trait in general, so that's entirely worth criticizing. This female character doesn't have any personality to speak of, not like the guy who courts her and for all we're aware of they're only into each other for their looks. The vast majority of scenes involving them can literally be summed up as:
"I just noticed you were here."
"I just noticed you were here."
"I'm going to stare suddenly and meaningfully at you."
"I'm going to stare right back."
"I take a step forward."
"I take a step back."
"I take another step forward."
"I run away."
SCENE.
Does she even have any lines beyond wimpering, cowering, and getting beaten by her father? I SURE DON'T REMEMBER. It doesn't help matters when the samurai excuse it as being predictable given that they all might die in the morning. Umm... WHAT?
By this point the samurai have already defeated MOST of the bandits primarily thanks to the villagers spearing them left and right. What reason do you have to believe you won't just MIGHT lose, but PROBABLY WILL lose? The odds were worse yesterday!
Also, why does the concept of getting stabbed or shot to death in the near future make you horny enough to stick your dick in the nearest wet towel that screams like a Japanese girl? THERE'S NOTHING THERE, SHE'S A BLOCK OF WOOD WITH A FACE, SHE'S FLATTER THAN FLAT STANLEY!
Also double standards.
2.) The scene where Kikuchiyo catches and spears a fish. We really needed that scene.
3.) The scene where Kikuchiyo tries to ride Yohei's horse and we get the excellent line, "Yohei's going to be upset if you break it's legs". We really REALLY needed that scene. I mean, do I even need to explain?
Is it not self-evident? Do we really need an analogy?
How 'bout: "The substitute teacher's going to be upset if you open fire on all those school children."
Alternatively: "It'd be an awful shame to lose a Starbucks because you blew up an airport."
2.) The scene where Kikuchiyo catches and spears a fish. We really needed that scene.
3.) The scene where Kikuchiyo tries to ride Yohei's horse and we get the excellent line, "Yohei's going to be upset if you break it's legs". We really REALLY needed that scene. I mean, do I even need to explain?
Is it not self-evident? Do we really need an analogy?
How 'bout: "The substitute teacher's going to be upset if you open fire on all those school children."
Alternatively: "It'd be an awful shame to lose a Starbucks because you blew up an airport."
Last thoughts: It seems overacting body language is almost unavoidable in Japanese movies, I don't know why, it's probably something dragged kicking and screaming from stage plays, but at least it's relatively mild here with the main exception obviously being Kikuchiyo who's just generally portrayed to be childishly energetic.
At least we don't have the ruthlessly dead exposition that we got with Battle Beyond the Stars, which is an unfortunate result because what BBTS seemed to take away from Seven Samurai most was just the basic concept, when Seven Samurai's greatest strength is it's varied and thoughtful character interactions.
Admittedly BBTS presents it's story in a significantly more digestable manner, but the same story is told significantly better in Seven Samurai, even down to maintaining unpredictability with character deaths.
I do have one question, though: How did that first samurai die? Did he trip and crack his head or something? He sorta flops over. Was he shot? I DON'T KNOW.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
REWATCH UPDATE (4/21/25):
Reading back my review, I think most of my criticisms were on point.
Heihachi's death, that is, one of the samurai who barely has a presence in the movie, is definitely edited terribly.
The way it appears onscreen is that he's fighting with Rikichi and gets knocked over. At the moment he impacts the ground there's a gunshot sound effect and everybody acts like he just got shot.
But he didn't act like he got shot, he acted like he fell over and shot himself... except he doesn't have a gun. So was it just a dramatic sound effect for stabbing himself? For breaking his back? That's a pretty shitty way for any character to go, to randomly fall over and severe their spine so loudly it sounds like a gunshot.
It's ****ing BAD. There's no other way to put it, there's no defending it.
As I also mentioned, Manzo, the character whose daughter brainlessly romances the youngest of the samurai and is paranoid of exactly that, is the worst character in the entire movie. He's just an irredeemably possessive scumbag character, in what is already a trio of shitty characters.
Shino, the daughter, as already no personality, and NO, I literally cannot remember a single line of dialog she speaks throughout the entire movie. She communicates almost entirely through a deer-in-the-headlights stare.
The samurai, Isao (whose name I had to look up), is also just annoying, not just for causing this dumb romantic conflict but also for being the archetypal watery-eyed aspirational character who'd sooner burst into tears or profess their adoration for their nearest senpai than do anything of actual value.
These three characters almost entirely comprise the romantic subplot and dilemma which is not only irrational from a modern day perspective, but it doesn't even make any sense in-universe.
Isao is allegedly from a "samurai family", whereas Shino is from a "farmer family", and these represent two separate classes. Is it NOT in the interest of the farmers to marry into an upper class family? Isn't that the whole dream scenario in these medieval/feudal settings, that a peasant catches the eye of nobility and nobility commits the faux pas of bringing them into their family?
Like, I don't get any impression from Manzo that he has any love for his daughter, women in these movies are almost all treated as chattel, so shouldn't he be pleased that a samurai takes a liking to his daughter? I just don't get it.
Arguably worst of all, the early scenes where Manzo expresses fear to the other villagers that their daughters are under threat from the samurai... never comes up again. It is super late into the movie when they pull the "I called it, our daughters are sluts for samurai!" card, but nobody cares. It doesn't affect morale in any apparent way, it doesn't disturb the trust that's been established, nobody takes his side... it just didn't serve a purpose at the end of the day. So it was literally just a complete waste of time and had no impact on the rest of the story whatsoever.
It's not even clear that Isao even gets the girl in the end.
The runtime, as already stated, is still pretty awful. Yojimbo is basically half of Seven Samurai's runtime. It is just so long and it doesn't need to be that long, especially when they waste a bunch of it on this vacuous romantic bullshit and animal abuse.
It takes 1 hour to recruit the samurai,
1 hour to fortify and train the village,
and the last hour is the whole siege.
For at reason, if for no other, I have definitely changed my mind about Seven Samurai being better than Yojimbo.
The cinematography's not nearly as interesting in this movie and while the music feels much improved over Yojimbo, I noticed that character dialog frequently sounds muffled and the overall leveling makes some conversations barely audible.
This is less obvious if you're only paying attention to the subtitles, but if I had to listen to them speaking Japanese, I'd have to turn up the volume in some scenes.
I'm mostly just repeating myself this time around, but this time time around I'm going to be a bit harsher with my rating:
Final Verdict: [Okay]