Seven Samurai

     Seven Samurai is considered one of the most influential movies ever made, and now having seen it, I can see why. It is credited for being the first film to use the now classic story setup of gathering an elite team for the purpose of accomplishing a daring mission. It also makes use of the iconic anime-style samurai showdown, though I'm not sure if this film was the first to do that. 
     This has definitely been my favorite Kurosawa film thus far. There really isn't much of a plot, but a strong plot is not necessary to make this movie good because what it lacks in plot, it makes up for in character. I feel that in terms of characters, this film has the most interesting cast out of all the movies I've seen. Each of the seven samurai have their own unique personality and make a very valuable contribution to the color of group as a whole. We have our wise veteran in the form of Kambei Shimada, the cheerful character is Heihachi Hayashida the "wood chopper," the cold-blooded swordsman Kyūzō, the naive aspiring youth Katsushirō Okamoto, and the comical "blue-collar" samurai imposter Kikuchiyo. The other two samurai Gorōbei Katayama and Shichirōj are less memorable characters, but are still important because of their battle experience. The way these characters interact with each other in the film is what makes it makes it so great. There's not a whole lot of character development in this film, but Kikuchiyo has some decent development throughout along with Katsushirō, and one of the peasants, Rikichi.

     I also feel that so far, this film is one of Kurosawa's most technically polished films as well. In his previous films, he had a tendency to linger on certain scenes longer than necessary, but that is not an issue here. Despite the incredible length of the film, I feel that it is well paced; each part adequately contributing to the experience, there was not a moment in this film that bored me, which is more than I can say for his previous works. The battle scenes are also better implemented. In his previous works, the fight scenes seemed like they were unmitigated blurs of chaos; sometimes this aided his climax, sometimes not. This time around though, there is much more method to the madness in his fight scenes. By that though I do not mean they are intricately choreographed fights like in the Star Wars prequels; honestly I think those are worse than random flailing anyway, there's no heart in a machine like sequence of that nature if you ask me, but that's another story entirely. Anywho, Kurosawa cleans up his fights in this movie by breaking them up into short skirmishes, and having the samurai explain the methods of their attack in strategy meetings beforehand so that we can clearly see the big picture of what is going on amidst the chaos of battle.
     Considering this movie was 4 hours long, there are more things I could say about this movie, but I don't want to spoil anything, and if this blog is much longer, I'm not sure if anyone would even read it. You missed a good movie at signs and wonders if you didn't see this, and you should check it out if get the chance (and have 4 hours to kill).