If the age depicted in the film was uncertain and tumultuous, the same could certainly also be said about the era of Japan that Kurosawa himself had witnessed. The icons of the Samurai film, even more so than the heavily iconic Western genre, define and delimit the form. And like those aforementioned titles, Sucker Punch’s epic invariably proves frustrating for the answers it provides for them anyway (“kind of,” “in broad strokes,” and the more Ozu-like “yes, but…”). Kyuzo was modelled after the legendary Musashi Miyamoto, while according Von Mueller, Kanbei was based on Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, a famed zen swordmaster (Post Script, 55). In films, painting and literature and theatre and music come together. “What makes the film remarkable (and surpasses any remake)”, writes Audie Bock in Japanese Film Directors, “is the portrayal of the characters and the development of socio-philosophical themes”. Kanbei, played by Takashi Shimura, can be seen as the unifying character, the wisest and most perfect of the samurai. Silent heroes might work in certain JRPGs, but “Ghost of Tsushima” only works so well as a samurai movie simulator because Jin accommodates the player without vacating his body to them — because his characterization allows for us to be him and watch him at the same time. SEVEN SAMURAI, Akira Kurosawa, 1954 - Sparring Scene - YouTube RELATED: 10 Western Films Influenced By Akira Kurosawa's Movies. The relationship between the villagers and the samurai is tested, both individually and as groups. The more that “Ghost of Tsushima” resembles a samurai movie, the more you notice the ways in which it falls short, and into an uncanny valley of its own design. Between these two groups most clearly stands Kikuchiyo, a farmer’s son pretending to be a samurai. If that emphasis on exploration has some precedent in samurai fiction, the island of Tsushima — while enormous for a video game map, and strikingly gorgeous by any kind of artistic standard — is still too small and ensconced by the same overall conflict to offer the sort of serialized, stranger-in-a-strange-town energy that Kurosawa imported from his favorite Westerns and brought to “Yojimbo.” At the same time, the open-world approach prioritizes the scale of the environment over the specificity of its various enclaves in a way that can deflate the movie-ness of it all. (210). Sign up for our Email Newsletters here. “That space is constantly being transformed into social terms where isolation and individualism are regarded as pathologies”. Dersu Uzala (1975) Set in the forests of Eastern Siberia at the turn of the century, the film is … All else is mere corruption. With six samurai now hired, and both time and rice running out, the group decides to go back to the village and start preparations. Most writers exploring Seven Samurai have made note of the film’s class boundaries and their possible social implications. On a closer reading, the film is clearly quite critical of most samurai that it depicts, showing them arrogant, self-centred and penniless. Many writers have picked on this theme, with Joan Mellen writing that “the real theme of the film [is] the passing away of the samurai class and the values by which Japan has lived and which it will be unable to maintain in days ahead” (Waves, 91). Yet, on closer inspection these group lines become blurred. “The game is completely playable in Kurosawa Mode, but I think that you miss a lot of the diversity of what it has to offer if you exclusively play it that way. Many have also underlined the point that in addition to the film’s seven heroic samurai, also its villains are in fact rōnin, or masterless samurai. And when men’s moral judgement fails, they would do well to listen to their women. It’s the best fight system of its kind since “Bushido Blade.”. “It’s something that people associate with samurai in these films, and yet as a player you want to feel like you’re inhabiting Jin’s shoes, and are inside his head. And at calculated intervals in the course of the unfolding come moments of Kurosawan truth.” (176) This “push-and-release rhythm” is easily recognisable in Seven Samurai, where weightier scenes are often followed by lighter, often comic ones. Yet six years earlier, in 1954, the same story had already been told in Kurosawa’s masterpiece, The Seven Samurai. By too literally trying to recreate a cinematic element from the movie that most inspired it, “Ghost of Tsushima” only underscores its fundamental gaminess. 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