Seven Samurai 4K 1954 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Japan, XVI century. The country is in the throes of civil war, and gangs of robbers and marauders are rampaging everywhere. The poor peasants hire seven samurai to defend the village, who do a little to unite the fragmented and cowardly villagers in the process of preparing and strengthening the village.

Review 4K Movie

Akira Kurosawa's classic film ‘Seven Samurai’ is usually positioned as an extremely humanistic film with a serious humanistic message. Nonsense. Right, in the film there is not a single truly positive hero, there is no, in fact, and the feat, and if there is, then committed it, are the last who needed it, special love for people is also not observed. Of course, based on objective prerequisites, and for some people also memories of childhood viewings, all expectations are aimed at seeing a beautiful, touching and somewhat straightforward old-school film, to which all this is forgiven in advance, for the highest craftsmanship and the time of birth.

As a result, it turns out that there is nothing to forgive ‘Samurai’ at all. It so happens that we will call it ‘the concept of the feat’ in one of the most famous films about the actual feat, there was no place for it. And the film, apparently due to its classical status, which is taken extremely seriously, turns out to be quite ironic, if not to say stereotypical. A classic plot, with inverted characters, inverted plot lines, all the signs of irony are there. How it should be ‘really’ is clear. Brave samurai selflessly stand up in defence of the poor, suffering peasants, those in turn idolise their saviours, and as a result the evil bandits are, of course, defeated, and everything ends well. Glory to the heroes and all that. Except that's not how things work in Kurosawa's film.

For starters, let's say that the bandits in the film are an ephemeral evil, absolutely impersonal. They do not carry any semantic or ideological load, they are needed only for the development of the plot. The confrontation between samurai and bandits, although formally placed in the foreground, is only a plot point and the author is practically not interested in it. The second, ‘real’ confrontation, for the sake of which the film was made, is between samurai and peasants. Here they are on opposite sides of the barricades, even if they do not immediately realise it. Actually, the central conflict between the saviours and the saved is so original for a feature film that even a list of one or two titles, of what was filmed before or after, does not add up.

So Kurosawa spends an entire hour of airtime showing how a squad of seven brave men was formed. And he does this not so much to introduce the viewer to all the characters, but to show how different their motivations were. A homeless upstart impostor wants to finally decide who he really is, a young man wants to find a teacher and become a real man-warrior, one has nothing to eat, another simply has nothing to do. And even if only one of them says directly, ‘I know how hard life is for the peasants, but I am not coming with you for their sake, but for the honour of fighting shoulder to shoulder with you’, it is obvious that from the whole squad only its leader went to the village solely for the sake of helping strangers. He is the one who will have the most to regret.

The peasants respond to the samurai with ‘reciprocity’. Not a single thank you will not be said, not a single truly positive deed we will not see from them. Right, do not take for them a banal desire to survive at any cost, which is quite inherent in animals. The love line, in fact, a standard attribute of such plots here plays an unusual role, and, perhaps, most clearly depicts the main conflict. One peasant says to his grief-stricken father, ‘at least she was with a samurai, not a bandit’. That is, it is clear that whatever happens, both are enemies, they just choose the lesser of two evils. And a gorgeous denouement, when the dishonoured girl herself leaves her beloved, preferring to stay in her native village and live with this disgrace all her life, but among her own. The power of caste, what can you do.

Thus, the film is not at all about how the samurai defeated the bandits. The main thing is that the author throughout the film pits samurai and peasants against each other, making one or the other in a more unpleasant light, but despite the final ‘the peasants won, not us’ he does not find any winners for himself. That said, the gulf between the classes is so great that even shared blood spilled does not bring them closer together in the slightest. And in Samurai, incidentally the most famous film about medieval Japan, Kurosawa takes a close look at the society of the time, but finds in it no positive primordial basis for the formation of modern Japanese mentality. In light of this, I wonder if everyone in Japan received the film so enthusiastically, or was it only by happy chance that the voices of the urapatriots were drowned out by the enthusiasm of the connoisseurs of beauty?

Otherwise, ‘Seven Samurai’ is a typical ‘big great movie’, only seven or eight of them were made. That is a large-scale, pretentious film with an extreme degree of perfectionism, when absolutely everything is brought to perfection.