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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.
                              


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