SPOILER TALK:
DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN “THE LAST SAMURAI!!!”
The three Hollywood conventions that keep “The Last Samurai” very good, but not great, are as follows:
1) The heavy-handed, overwrought villain being blamed for cultural shifts.
2) The hero gets the girl. Tom Cruise’s Algren should not get the girl in the end because of the following point…
3) The hero always lives. The inexorable logic pushing “The Last Samurai” forward should claim Algren’s life by the end of the film, but it does not. The movie ends about three scenes after it ought, but he should have died on that field. It’s debatable whether we need to see the Emperor’s transformation at all. Our watching could be good enough to get the movie’s point across: that we should never whore our humanity in favor of progress. But Timothy Spall (the English photographer) could have witnessed the Emperor anyway.
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