SANADA HIROYUKI
THE LAST SAMURAI
DIRECTED BY EDWARD ZWICK
2003
SEE THE REAL-LIFE
LAST SAMURAI IN THE HISTORY
OF JAPAN
Click here
for story & pictures of Lord Saigo Takamori 
Click here for overall view of the real-life last samurai
in the Meiji era
Click here for detailed
and complete maps of Japan, all the provinces and warlords, and where Tom
Cruise's
'Matsumoto' clan is supposed to be.
Sanada Hiroyuki was the one who taught Tom Cruise how to swordsfight, onscreen and offscreen alike all through the American take on Sanada's usual genre, The Last Samurai (Warner, 2003). Sanada is a real-life master of such art. The story is not so fictional either; it centered on the warlord Matsumoto (an absolutely convincing gig of Watanabe Ken), who clashed against Emperor Meiji's post-1868 'Westernization' and, by the time the movie gets unrolled, it is 1877 and Matsumoto lost his place among the teenage Emperor's cabinet and board of advisors for good. Tom Cruise, as the allegedly disillusioned Captain Nathan Algren of the U.S. Army, of course, regains romanticism when he lived with Matsumoto's men -- and a Matsumoto woman, as a matter of course; the warlord's own sister Taka (played by the actress who looks exactly like the Japanese character of her name means, Koyuki) on the neverlandy mountain of the falling snow (savvy?). Sanada Hiroyuki has to ride behind not just his Lord Watanabe but also Cruise -- his character Ujio is a Matsumoto Captain, so he's under Watanabe's command; and, nevermind what Cruise's role is supposed to be, it is his movie. This is probably the only caucasian samurai movie that makes sense, as far as I know. The un-Japanese tricks work along the way; the characteristically low-paced stream of understatements sliced by silence in the made-in-Japan movies is nowhere to be found here, so it dispels the usually exclusivist appeal of such flicks outside the land of origin. At the same time, the clumsy touristic approach -- orientalism and exoticism that are inevitable whenever Hollywood tells of a caucasian stranded somewhere in 'the far east' -- is to a great extent inexistent. Even Cruise acts better than his usual -- and looks like one heck of a paragon of everything good about his hemisphere. I only hope it dawns to you that not every Japanese can play a samurai in the movies, so that you'd dig the fact that 'Sanada' and 'Watanabe' -- even if pseudonyms -- were names of real-life great clans of warriors. 'Matsumoto', 'Ujio', and so forth are fictional, but the spirit is nothing imaginary. Lord Matsumoto is probably based on the bio of real-life last samurai in Japanese history, Lord Saigo Takamori of Kagoshima (click here for story and pictures). It's a good thing, too, that Matsumoto's son is named 'Nobutada'; there was a real young man of that name in late 1500's who spent his 25 years of life as commander of a large army and died fighting until the last sec of it. Oda Nobunaga's son. |
First
swordsplay for the typically clueless American hostage, high in the mountains
of Lord Matsumoto's sanctuary.
Matsumoto Captain Ujio still didn't get it; why haven't they discard this
useless barbarian when he lost the war?
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Algren got his own sword right before going to war. This time he's fighting for the Matsumoto clan. He's wearing the armor that used to get donned by a man that he killed in the previous battle against them.
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Matsumoto Nobutada got surrounded by the newly-built Imperial Police Force the instant he hangs out wearing a sword in the newly-named Tokyo;something predictable and yet heartbreak is in the air.
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Lord Matsumoto's last stand; everybody has forgotten to let us know why the Imperial Army that Algren trained was so ridiculously underachieving, why the Matsumoto clan doesn't have any single speck of ammo and absolutely no gun; the 'rebels' of Satsuma in real life of that era were armed as good as those in Gettysburg. This is Japan in late 1870's, man. They had been using guns and cannons since 1560's. Even Captain Cook's islanders fired like Dirty Harry. Lord Matsumoto in this movie smacks so much of real-life last samurai Lord Saigo Takamori of Kagoshima, whose bio is fictionalized here. SEE
THE REAL LAST
SAMURAI IN THE HISTORY
OF JAPAN |
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