Skip to main content

Seven Samurai (1954)

I watched an old Japanese movie Seven Samurai out of curiosity since I have not watched old Asian movies at all. Seven Samurai has been awarded 2 Oscars and a couple of more awards, which was the reason I chose this one. First I will briefly go through the storyline.


Image source: https://www.film89.co.uk/seven-samurai-1954-kurosawas-beautiful-action-epic/

A poor Japanese village is constantly being attacked by bandits, who demand their crops making the living hard for the villagers. Their task is to recruit samurais to help them defend the village, but they are not able to pay accordingly, only with the food they have. A veteran samurai agrees to help them and gathers 6 more samurais to join him. They teach villagers how to defend themselves and secure the village. The movie culminates with a battle when 40 bandits attack the village. As a result, 4 samurais have fallen,  but the bandits are successfully defeated.

Even though the movie was 3 hours long I was actually enjoying watching it. It tells a good story about heroism and overall it was interesting to get an insight about a culture that is not very well known to me. It was quite refreshing to watch something so different from the usual Hollywood movies. The movie was in black and white, which was a bit hard to get used to when switching from Netflix all day. :) It did not however ruin the experience of watching it. It was hard at times to identify characters for some reason. Maybe because of the foreign names and faces (not offence meant, just being honest). There is also quite exaggerated actor play in the movie, but I believe that applies to most of the older movies. I also noticed that the movie dedicates a lot of time to show emotions of the characters rather than action. This is the scene that got me emotionally the most. It shows the graveyard after the battle, where the four samurais and a dozen of villagers are buried:

seven_fourgraves
Image source: https://filmcapsule.com/2016/11/07/seven-samurai-1954/

Overall I enjoyed the movie for its emotional aspect mostly and would suggest it to those who want to watch something different.
                              


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Disturbed - The Sound Of Silence analysis

In this post, I will do a textual analysis of Disturbed metal band's song The Sound Of Silence. I chose this song because it is one of those songs, which gives me emotional chills every time I listen to it. This song is only a cover by Disturbed but is quite different from the original one. But before heading to the analysis, here is the song's video: The genre of this song falls under the rock, however, it is quite different in the sense of what we usually perceive as rock music. There is no presence of electric guitar, bass, and drums as it is usual in rock music, but instead, there is piano, acoustic guitar and timpani. In some cases, it is classified also as a piano rock, which I completely agree with. I would not classify this song just as a rock genre as the sound and the feeling of it does not represent rock music in my eyes. The singer (David Draiman) is represented as the storyteller in the music video. At the beginning of the video, the artist seems to be vu...

Cartoons that predicted future

I have heard more and more cases where cartoons predicted the future and some of them have done it in quite a significant scale. It is somewhat creepy but intriguing enough for me to go digging up on which cartoons have done that. I know that there are quite a lot of cases so I will not cover many of them in this post and will go through a couple of examples. On top of the list will be of course The Simpsons , because I think that it has the most discussed cases in predicting the future. In one episode there was a frame with a brochure saying "New York at $9" and behind are the twin towers, which form together 9/11. The episode came out in 1997. The creators say that it was just a bizarre coincidence. "New York at $9" brochure (Image source:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/arts/television/simpsons-prediction-future.html ) Another prediction from The Simpsons was that Trump became president of US and Theresa May the prime minister of UK. 'The Regi...

D'Artagnan and Three Musketeers (1979)

Probably most of you have seen at least one version of D'Artagnan and Three Musketeers, but I will be writing about the USSR version of it, which I doubt is well known beyond post-Soviet countries. It is a three-part musical series first aired in 1979 and is considered to be one of the Soviet Union classics. I watched it the first time when I was 10 or so and even though it is quite filled with flaws and ridiculous stuff I came to consider it as one of my childhood classics, which I keep coming back for. D'Artagnan and Three Musketeers poster (Image source: https://rutube.ru/metainfo/tv/6440/ ) The story portraits France at the beginning of the 17th century. D'Artagnan being poor and young is heading to Paris in order to join royal musketeers as his father did before. On the way, he gets in a conflict with Rochefort, an agent of the Cardinal, which results with him being robbed and beaten. When he meets with M. De Tréville, the captain of musketeer gu...