Fresh
It's easy to stand back and wax ironic about The Last Samurai. But it's not all that difficult to succumb to its full-spirited romanticism either.
Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine
The Last Samurai
In the face of an enemy, in the heart of one man, lies the soul of a warrior.
2003 · 2h 34m · R
Action, Drama, War
Directed by
Edward Zwick
Overview
Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
65%
Tomatometer
Rotten
Competently mounted in its studiedly immersive, elongated way, Zwick's earnest costume epic dresses a knee-jerk, reactionary sensibility in exotic garb.
Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Fresh
The Last Samurai is an idyll in which the savageries of existence are transcended by spiritual devotion. That's a beautiful dream, and it gives the film a deep pleasingness, but the fullness of life and its blackest ambiguities are sacrificed.
Peter Rainer, New York Magazine/Vulture
Rotten
Disappointingly content to recycle familiar attitudes about the nobility of ancient cultures, Western despoilment of them, liberal historical guilt, the unrestrainable greed of capitalists and the irreducible primacy of Hollywood movie stars.
Todd McCarthy, Variety
Rotten
There are pleasures to be had in the handsome, heroic The Last Samurai. But they're all on the surface.
David Ansen, Newsweek
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