This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Pretty Good

Am I Missing Something?

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The tale of the 47 ronin is one of the great Japanese tales, forming one of the central traditional bases of the national character. It concerns an actual historical incident that occurred in 1701 to 1703. For three centuries the story has been taught to school children. It teaches the values of loyalty, self-sacrifice, honor, and integrity, even in the face of certain death. Those not familiar with the story can find numerous accounts on the web (e.g., on Wikipedia).Sadly this movie version is a disappointment. It simply does not really engage the viewer. Many key points of the story are omitted, even though the movie is 209 minutes! If I did not already know the tale from other sources, I would have had difficulty understanding the context or significance of much of the action. This great epic deserves much better.

In 1962, Toho Ltd. released "Chuchingura" as an anniversary piece. At nearly four hours' length, it almost requires a devotion to Japanese cinema and the culture's many nuances to appreciate. But it is exquisitely filmed in Toho Vision, right down to the fluttering cherry blossoms and snow tumbling from trees, and the costumes, sets and makeup win my awards for best I've seen from Tokyo. Having been to Japan and studied Japanese literature and language in the '60s, it was fairly easy for me to get into the story. Indeed, it has been written about many times, and anyone who has read one of the stories should be able to follow the plot. Like many epic films, it begins to bog down in the center, as the ronin go their separate ways and take up all matters of industry and living conditions, fall in love or not, waiting for the day of retribution. We are led up to that point with the unfolding of the drama behind the story. The fast-paced conclusion brings it all together and ends, rather abruptly I thought, with a narrative about what happens once the deed was fulfilled. It's a story of loyalty and courage to the nth degree. The bushido code is one of Japan's most revered cultural elements and it is celebrated here. If you can tolerate the length, the film is definitely worth a look, if for no other reason than to understand more about what the Japanese samurai life in the 18th and 19th centuries was like.

I read the old play in an Asian History class in college some quarter-century ago, so I don't remember a lot of the "classic" plot. So I came to this movie almost cold, only knowing that there were 47 masterless samurai bound to avenge their master. This no doubt colored my view of the pacing, which to my mind took a very long time to get to the point where the young Daimyo Asano was provoked into his fatal breach of protocol.I thought that the villain, Lord Kino, was painted awfully black, a shameless greedhead and womanizer and a coward to boot, as well as playing petty personal politics. Since it had been so long since I read the play, I don't know whether the traditional portrayal of this character is quite as one-sided as here, or whether he is traditionally portrayed as believing himself to have been morally in the right, rather than merely self-serving. Portraying Kino as believing he was himself an honorable man would have made the young Daimyo's choice between defending his personal honor, and violating formal protocol, more poignant. Thus the ronin's own dilemma would have not only been between conflicting expectations of traditional duty, but a question of which course of action would be Doing the Right Thing in an abstract sense.I found the way the movie was edited made it difficult to distinguish one sequence from another -- I could not always tell whether a new sequence was begun, or the cut was a continuation of the current overall scene.Near the end, as the ronin are gathering for their final assault of Kino's palace, we cut to a brief scene, in which one woman, hidden in a hooded cloak, attacks another woman with a blade while she is sleeping. The sleeping woman awakes and subdues her attacker, pulling back her hood so we can see her face. My partner and I could not figure out which women in the story these were, nor how this fit into the larger plot. Could one of you who has seen this movie multiple times clue me in on what happened here?

This is one of my favorite stories and this film does it great justice. It is a "must". Check it out! The acting is very good, as is the "staging" of action. The gamut of emotions is wide. The story develops is a slow, inevitable, and suspenseful way --- even if one actually knows the ending beforehand. The motivations of the characters are clear. Their internal conflicts between duty, pride and sorrow, on the one hand, and the desire for a normal life, on the other, are strongly portrayed --- as are their nostalgia and sense of loss. The interesting quality of this story is that there is no one protagonist: All of the characters must take part. It is easy to see how the story has remained so popular for about 300 years. To my mind, however, this film is not quite as visually "beautiful" as the black and white "47 Ronin" that was made in 1940, I believe. Check it out!