The Last Samurai Review

The thing that keeps it standing is Ken Watanabe. Katsumoto is written as a symbol and played as a man with a sense of humour, and every scene he shares with Tom Cruise tilts toward him; his Oscar nomination was the correct read of what the film actually has. John Toll shoots the New Zealand hills standing in for Japan with enormous, unhurried compositions, and the opening ambush in fog is a genuinely great sequence, cavalry appearing and vanishing in white.

Hans Zimmer's score does a great deal of the emotional work, sometimes too much. The problem is the shape. This is a white outsider who arrives, learns faster than anyone should, and becomes the best of them, and the film is too sincere to notice what that costs the people it admires. Cruise is committed and slightly miscast, better in the drunk early scenes than the transcendent later ones. The final charge is staged for grandeur rather than sense. It believes every word it says, which is both why it works and why it will not survive a cynical viewing.