Year: 1954
Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura
Written by: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni
This is a movie so great many of its plot elements have been recycled countless of times. Seven Samurai has spawned a lot of great movies of their own rights: Magnificent Seven and A Bug's Life to mention a couple. There's a slight problem with viewing a classic that has aged as well as Seven Samurai today - it feels formulaic. So many things can be predicted such as the romance between a young samurai and a village girl, many splastick incidents, the climactic battle and the ultimate sacrifice that comes after that.
Fortunately Seven Samurai is so fine a movie that even those slight problems don't deal too much blow on my enjoyment of the movie. Of all the plot borrowed by modern filmmakers, there's one essential element prominent in this film that is frequently missing in their movies: character development, which is actually helped by the film's lengthy running time. All the Seven, especially Mifune's Kikuchiyo and Shimura's Kambei, are fleshed out as breathing human beings with their own personalitites and motivations. As a result, we root and care for them in every skirmish they're in.
Seven Samurai is undisputably one of the best films ever made. The battle scenes are superbly directed and coreographed and we understand what each character's role is and what he is doing or planning to do. The acting is superb. After playing a lowly woodcutter in Rashomon (羅生門), Takashi Shimura skillfully brought some of his innate gravitas into his character: the wise and noble leader of the Seven, Kambei while Mifune had to bring his maniacal self to play the mercurial Kikuchiyo. This Kurosawian epic about an underappreciated valor is one of the earliest examples of artistic and blockbuster filmmaking seamlessly blended together.
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