Seven Samurai (1954)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.
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What critics compared Seven Samurai to
This film draws on so many precedents that I can only list a few: Unforgiven for the grim revenge tale with no limits set on that revenge; Seven Samurai for the story of assembling a motley crew in order to achieve a mission; Lone Wolf and Cub for the theme of the few battling the many and for the almost absurd excesses of the final battle; Ran for the attention to period feel and detail; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the theme of people stuck in the ethos of a past era while the world has moved on; and any number of exploitation horror films (the Saw franchise, The Human Centipede) for the grotesque mutilations that are depicted in 13 Assassins.
Film buffs tend to forget, with the half century or more of hoopla surrounding “Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo,” that samurai pictures were and remain the equivalent of Westerns in Japan — formula films with time-honored motifs, action beats and archetypes.
So it remained a question whether Miike’s over-the-top sensibility could connect with the very rigid forms of samurai cinema, set forth by classic films like “Seven Samurai.”
The plot has received its fair number of comparisons to Kurosawa Akira's legendary Seven Samurai , which I think tells us more about American film critics' relationship with Japanese cinema than it does about 13 Assassins, though I take it as read that Miike was not exempting Kurosawa from his catch-as-catch-can approach.
Those walking into “13 Assassins” expecting something sick and twisted, however, might be surprised to discover that it’s one of Miike’s most reserved films to date – a classic samurai tale that, while very similar to Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” in spirit, is actually a remake of the 1963 film by Eiichi Kudo.
Much more consistent is 13 Assassins , a surprisingly classical epic in the Seven Samurai mode by Japanese bad boy Takashi Miike.
Akira Kurosawa was a pioneer of filmmaking who created and directed such film classics as “Seven Samurai”, and “Hidden Fortress” (just to name a few), and Zwick manages to create a love letter and a magnificent homage to the innovative director by paying tribute to the art of the samurai, a dying art that intertwines with the tale of one man’s redemption.
If not quite up to the standard of 1989's "Glory" -- director Edward Zwick's last historical war epic -- the film is nonetheless filled with exhilarating, gruesomely beautiful battle sequences and stylish nods to the great Kurosawa films, especially "Seven Samurai," "Yojimbo" and "Ran."
But again, this is an outsider's story and The Last Samuria has more in common with Dances with Wolves than with Seven Samurai.
Here, the connection is more broad-based, with Ran and Seven Samurai particularly coming to mind.
The top three greatest battle scenes ever filmed belong to Shakespeare adaptations: Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, Akira Kurosawa's Ran and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, followed by Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.
Co-written by Kurt Johnstad ( 300 ) and Shay Hatten ( John Wick: Chapter 4 ), Rebel Moon is obviously borrowing a lot from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai .
The story is blatantly inspired by Seven Samurai as a group of “space fascists” with wardrobe so clumsily obvious, it’s like a spoof of a satire ( Starship Troopers ), descend upon a farming community on some distant planet and force the locals to give up nearly their entire harvest or be destroyed.
It was a cross between Star Wars and Seven Samurai, where he even originally pitched his idea to Lucasfilm as a standalone Star Wars movie not connected to the Skywalker saga.
If all of that sounds familiar, it’s because Rebel Moon cribs its plot wholesale from Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai alongside its heaping helping of Star Wars .
That Rebel Moon is so clearly riffing off of Star Wars and Seven Samurai makes its failure more interesting.
With a vibe that evokes “Young Guns” over “Seven Samurai,” this 2016 version is directed by gifted filmmaker Antoine Fuqua, a genre director fully capable of making tolerable completely derivative material.
Antoine Fuqua’s “The Magnificent Seven” is an interesting case in that it’s technically a remake of a remake, based on the 1960 John Sturges film of the same name, which was itself inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.”
While “elegant” might not be the first word used to describe John Sturges’ classic western “The Magnificent Seven,” it’s certainly an adjective that seems like a worthy descriptor, especially when watching Antoine Fuqua’s contemporary take on the tale that started with Akira Kurosawa’s peerless “Seven Samurai.”
But this remake of a 1960 film — which was itself inspired by the Japanese classic “Seven Samurai” (1954) — lacks the spirit that made the genre so popular for so long.
Here’s an idea: Take inspiration from the actual original Magnificent Seven — 1954’s Seven Samurai — and do a remake set in the not-so-old West of 1940s Japanese internment camps, in which patriotic Japanese-Americans fight back against being treated like traitors and criminals, and suddenly a shameful era in American history that no one wants to talk about gets epic kickass big-screen exposure.
Hollywood’s originality crisis continues with “The Magnificent Seven,” an echo of John Sturges’ 1960 remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 “Seven Samurai.”
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Instead, throughout the film, the hues in various scenes evoke the feeling of such classics as Sergio Leone’s Westerns and Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.”
Mad Max becomes a kind of mercenary fighting on behalf of the good people defending a small-scale oil refinery against marauders after the fashion of “Seven Samurai” that his talents as a screenwriter and director begin to emerge.
After paying homage to John Woo’s heroic bloodshed movies in his drug-cartel thriller The White Storm almost three years ago, Hong Kong filmmaker Benny Chan Muk-sing has returned with his best film in years in Call of Heroes, a Chinese wuxia epic with obvious echoes to classic spaghetti Western films and Akira Kurosawa’s samurai dramas like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.
The title is an homage to Toshiro Mifune, the Japanese master thespian whose role in Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" was the inspiration for Kresten's and his brother's favorite childhood role-playing game.
("Saving Private Ryan," as Steven Spielberg has often admitted, is yet another film directly inspired by "Samurai.")
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Well, Kurosawa has inspired other good American movies (his “Seven Samurai” was remade as “The Magnificent Seven,” and “Yojimbo” also loosely inspired “A Fistful of Dollars”), but here the attempt to move the story from Japan to Texas seems pointless, because the movie made from it isn't Kurosawa, or a Western, or a gangster movie, or anything else other than a mannered, juiceless, excruciatingly repetitive exercise in style.
The story, lifted wholesale from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), finds the dictator Sador (John Saxon) threatening the planet of Akira.