The Last Samurai (2003) The Last Samurai (2003)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (The Last Samurai) | Backbeats (The Last Samurai)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Edward Zwick
  • Screenplay: John Logan, Edward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz (story by John Logan)
  • Starring: Tom Cruise (Capt. Nathan Algren, U.S. Army cavalry officer and Civil War / Indian Wars veteran), Ken Watanabe (Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu, samurai leader of the rebellion), Timothy Spall (Simon Graham, English translator and chronicler), Hiroyuki Sanada (Ujio, Katsumoto's lieutenant and swordsman), Koyuki (Taka, widow of the samurai Algren killed and his host in the village), Tony Goldwyn (Col. Bagley, Algren's former commanding officer), Masato Harada (Omura, Meiji-era industrialist and adviser to the Emperor), Shichinosuke Nakamura (Emperor Meiji), Billy Connolly (Sgt. Zebulon Gant)
  • Cinematography: John Toll
  • Editor: Steven Rosenblum, Victor Du Bois
  • Music: Hans Zimmer
  • Runtime: 154 minutes
  • Budget: approximately $140 million
  • Worldwide Box Office: approximately $456 million
  • Release Date: December 5, 2003 (US)
  • MPAA Rating: R
  • Distributor: Warner Bros.

Overview

A drunk, hollowed-out U.S. cavalry captain hired to modernize the Imperial Japanese Army is captured in a botched first engagement against a samurai rebellion, taken to the rebels' mountain village to recover, and slowly absorbed into the way of life he was paid to help destroy. The film is set in the Meiji Restoration era around 1876–77, with a climactic engagement modeled on the Battle of Shiroyama and the historical Satsuma Rebellion of Saigō Takamori. Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren as a man whose Indian Wars service has left him incapable of standing his own reflection; Ken Watanabe's Katsumoto is the rebel daimyō whose clarity about purpose and death becomes the language Algren learns. The film is widely read as a Western-coded outsider-among-warriors fable in the Dances with Wolves mold, but its structural argument is narrower: Algren's procedural soldier's playbook is shown to be empty by a culture organized around a coherent code, and the surviving rebels' last charge — sufficient as witness, insufficient as battle — converts Algren into the chronicler who can deliver Katsumoto's sword to a boy emperor still capable of choosing.