Director: Edward Zwick

Starring: Ken Watanabe, Tom Cruise :

Everybody loves a good conversation, even the samurai, especially when he wants to practise English with an American prisoner that he saved. This is not the best samurai movie but it makes good entertainment.

The year is 1876. Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is sent to Japan to train the emperor’s troops to shoot and kill. The new Japanese politics wants to do away with things old, which includes their roots and the ways of the samurai.

Algren teaches the Japanese troops but in their very first encounter with the samurais, he is captured. Defeat is a shame that a samurai cannot bear. He dies by his own sword or that of his enemy’s. Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), the last samurai of Japan, chooses instead to let Algren live. Thus begins the friendship between two.

Algren is taken into captivity and as he learns of the ways of the “barbarians”, he nderstands that they are more sophisticated and disciplined than the West. It is strange that the samurai is rushed indoors in the protection of his troops when the village is attacked but this is a movie, which if you mean to enjoy, must be watched without asking questions.

Intrigued by the ways of the samurai however, Algren begins to learn to be one of them and wins their respect with his loyalty. Soon, he will be freed and he must return to Tokyo and train the troops. As the West leads Japan into a civil war — he must decide. Which side will he choose?

Spruced with melodrama, the war scenes are well-portrayed. The direction is remarkable and dialogues crisp. The sound editing is praiseworthy. Cruise does not slide into this unconventional role as easily as he does in his sci-fi ventures such as ‘Vanilla Sky’ or ‘Minority Report’. Watanabe sketches a different character from typecast fighters. — Abha Eli Phoboo