seven samurai remake western
After the samurai form their team, the middle of the film is devoted to exploring their growing relationship with the villagers, as they train them to become a defensive fighting force and slowly bond. Kurosawa did not simply use such themes and produce a version of an American Western set in Japan; he innovated new character and narrative types, and in many ways permanently changed the genre. RELATED: 10 Best Movies By Black Directors, According To IMDb Of course, being a modern film on its own right, … The 1980 Roger Corman production Battle Beyond the Stars was basically a cheap, cheesy sci-fi remake of The Magnificent Seven; it even starred one of the Sturges seven, Robert Vaughn. Everyone in the movie is exactly who he or she seems to be from the outset, and everything happens exactly as you expect it to happen. Lacking the ability to fight back themselves, they decide to hire a gunman, a bounty hunter named Chisholm (Denzel Washington). Once set on track, its narrative engine never derails. The “original” Magnificent Seven, released in 1960, was itself a remake. That’s where it will remain and glow like a Sun. Gadi in 1966 (quoted from Cardullo).The American film is, of course, a remake of our last month’s film, Seven Samurai. With all the buzz around the recent trailer for The Magnificent Seven 2016 remake, I thought it might be suitable to revisit the original film. There was a Magnificent sequel, and now a remake, but Samurai‘s influence is cosmic. Seven Samurai remains one of my favorite films of all time. SEVEN SAMURAI. In turn, the Seven Samurai's own influence has been wide and deep. This year’s remake of The Magnificent Seven, based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. His father also encouraged him and his brother to watch many American and European films, and Kurosawa grew up with a love of western film traditions and Westerns (note in this section that western—lower case—refers to films from the US and Europe, while Western—capital W—refers to a specific genre of films about the American West, usually involving outlaws and cowboys). Directed by Antoine Fuqua, it is a film with many ideas but lacks the patience or the craftsmanship to really make them work. In April, Vox launched a way for readers to support our work with financial contributions — and we've been blown away by the response. Yet there’s something comfortable and friendly about it. From the American cowboy remake The Magnificent Seven (1960) to Pixar’s insect adventure A Bug’s Life (1998), the premise of Seven Samurai simmers in the cinematic consciousness. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, who specializes in competent but utterly conventional action films, it’s a contemporary exercise in tension, violence, and retribution. In the book, 19-year old Nayeli is inspired after watching The Magnificent Seven (1960; an American Western remake of Seven Samurai ) to head north to recruit seven men to protect her Mexican village from bandidos. It’s primal and elegant, a story so simple that it works almost at the level of myth. Often regarded as one of the greatest films of all time – and the first “Action Film” “It has remained highly influential, often seen as one of the most “remade, reworked, referenced” films in cinema. Kurosawa was considered the most Western of great Japanese directors (too Western, some of his Japanese critics sniffed). What holds it all together is the primal simplicity of the plot, in which a threat is made by an evil person and a band of warriors must defend the defenseless. The Magnificent Seven dresses up Seven Samurai as a Western, but its bones are the same. That’s it. The simplicity and sturdiness of Seven Samurai’s plot accounts for much of what makes it so powerful, and so adaptable: It never strays off on tangents in search of the sort of quick narrative highs that can make more labyrinthine plots so appealing. Clocking in at nearly three and a half hours long, the film is an epic in every sense: Its $500,000 budget made it the most expensive film ever produced in Japan up until that point, and filming took 148 days, far longer than initially planned. We'll always lose.” But overall it’s more of a straightforward action movie, a crowd-pleasing shoot-’em-up that barrels toward a satisfying, violent showdown. Seven Samurai study guide contains a biography of Akira Kurosawa, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Japan’s political chaos and lack of centralized government and law enforcement produced an environment not completely unlike the American Western frontier, leaving many simple farmers and travelers in small towns and communities defenseless against attacks from criminals. That’s the whole plot, the complete story. Director Akira Kurosawa was a John Ford fanboy who transplanted the Hollywood Western onto feudal Japan. We want to add 2,020 more founding contributors to our supporter base by the end of the year. Bridgerton wants to explore consent while it ignores its own glaring consent issue. We talked to Matt Gertz of Media Matters about Trump’s one-sided feud with Fox, the rise of OAN and Newsmax, and where right-wing cable news is headed. The classic Western The Magnificent Seven is a remake of Seven Samurai that transplants the story to the Wild West, and plenty of other Westerns have similarly found inspiration in the film. It is not a version of Seven Samurai.I do not know why they call it that.” This is how Kurosawa described The Magnificent Seven, our AK film club‘s film for August, in an interview with R.B. At just over two hours long, The Magnificent Seven lacks the epic scale of Kurosawa’s film, but the bones of the movie, despite the change in setting, are almost exactly the same: It is the story of a community coming together to fight off an external threat with the aid of a band of lone warriors. ... and now a remake, but Samurai‘s influence is ... Everyone knows about Seven Samurai. Updated September 22, 2016 at 04:21 PM EDT, Credit: Everyone knows about Seven Samurai. Sign up for the The movie, a remake of the classic 1960 John Sturges Western of the same name, starts when a villainous robber baron, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), threatens a small mining town and the villagers vow to resist. The best-known remake of Seven Samurai is, of course, The Magnificent Seven, which brings its story to the Old West. Seven samurai who banded together to fight bandits, and seven superheroes to form the Justice League and fight evil. And it is a reminder, as Hollywood plots have grown both flimsier and more complex, of the virtues of a simple, straightforward story told well. At the end, after the final battle, one of the surviving samurai surveys the carnage and declares that “in the end, we lost this battle too. Along the way, Kurosawa carves out space to explore themes of love and loyalty, justice and vengeance, individualism and community identity. Part of the reason the new version feels so familiar is because the plot elements that drove the original pair of films have been recycled so frequently over the years: Pixar’s early animated feature A Bug’s Life relies on almost exactly the same story as Seven Samurai, with numerous scenes and shots replicated using CGI ants instead of actors. "Seven Samurai" represents a great divide in his work; most of his earlier films, Jeck observes, subscribe to the Japanese virtues of teamwork, fitting in, going along, conforming. The Magnificent Seven itself then became one of the most influential Westerns of its time, making the Seven Samurai massively influential on the genre. We lost. This year, support from our founding contributors has helped us create projects that millions relied on to understand a year of chaos, and to keep their families safe. John Sturges’s film was a Westernization of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai , in both senses of the word. There’s an initial encounter between Chisholm’s men and Bogue’s, and then a period of waiting and preparation before Bogue and his army of thugs return, which they do. I think Yojimbo is probably a better representation of his work. Kurosawa's father came from a samurai family, and as a child, Kurosawa enjoyed relative affluence and an education that was attentive to the arts. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Six Assassins is … These themes were quite compatible with a samurai film about the Sengoku period (roughly the mid-15th to late 16th century). Despite its running time, the movie is masterfully paced — a long, slow build to a chaotic, bloody, and inevitable showdown. It’s a tale you’ve seen told over and over again before, one whose inherent satisfactions are eternal. The Magnificent Seven (2016) The Magnificent Seven is a very loose 2016 remake of the original The Magnificent Seven (see below) from 1960, which in turn was a western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. This influence extends far beyond the American remake of the film, John Sturges' respectful but hollow The Magnificent Seven , or even warm-hearted homages like Jim Jarmusch's hip-hop samurai gangster film Ghost Dog or the Dogma pastiche Mifune in 1999. In Seven Samurai, he paid homage more specifically to the genre of the Western by using elements and tropes common to the genre: outlaws threaten the safety of many innocents, while unexpected or reluctant heroes must emerge to save them. Roger Ebert, a prominent film critic, wrote in a review of the film that he believes the sequence that introduces Kambei could be the origin of the method of introducing the central hero with a task unrelated to the plot of the film, which became a common practice in Westerns and action films more generally. newsletter. After days of needless anxiety, Trump signs the $900 billion stimulus package, US citizen spouses and children of undocumented immigrants will finally get stimulus checks, What Biden could do about family separations. video for The real cost of smart speakers, Fox News’s post-Trump identity crisis, explained by an expert. Copyright © 1999 - 2020 GradeSaver LLC. Seven Samurai was one of the first few films to use a now-common plot device of gathering heroes into a team before the adventure, for the specific purpose of the goal in the film, and using this part of the film to establish their characterizations, morals, and relationships to one another to be developed over the course of the film. Not affiliated with Harvard College. Chisholm rounds up a half-dozen more men of varying talents and personalities, and they form a team determined to protect the town. As he prepares the village to defend itself against the bandit assault, Kambei tells residents that the “nature of war” is that “by protecting others, you save yourselves.”. And like many myths, it’s a story that can be told and retold in almost any setting, with almost any set of characters, like a classic cocktail that allows for practically endless variation. The same goes for this year’s remake. Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) was the inspiration for M7 1960. The set of the 1960s Western was awash in toxic masculinity, fragile egos, ... actor Yul Brynner fell in love with Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and wanted to remake it as a Hollywood Western. The film is an Old West–style remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai.Brynner, McQueen, Bronson, Vaughn, Dexter, Coburn … Kurosawa packed Seven Samurai with solemn themes, but the structure ensures that it never loses its momentum. GradeSaver "Seven Samurai Seven Samurai and the Western". With Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Eli Wallach. Additionally, many of the character types in the ensemble cast would become classic to the Western genre, especially Kikuchiyo—the unpredictable, often ridiculous, comic character was popular for his ability to bring comic relief and often acts as a uniting force (in Seven Samurai, he unites the villagers and samurai despite their different, seemingly incompatible, attitudes and moralities). It's one of The Magnificent Seven’s strengths, though you can't quite credit the movie itself, because that's also almost exactly how everything happened in the 1960 Sturges film. It is not just a rethinking of the 1960 movie of the same name — which was a western remake of “Seven Samurai” and featured Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson saving a … The name itself is indicative enough - The Magnificent Seven from 2016 is a loose remake of the 1960's classic, The Magnificent Seven, which was a Western remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.Much like A Fistful of Dollars, Magnificent Seven replaced the samurai with cowboys. Sturges was an admirer of the Japanese master, and transposed his story of feudal conflict into … Seven gunmen from a variety of backgrounds are brought together by a vengeful young widow to protect her town from the private army of a destructive industrialist. This time, the movie serves as a vehicle for Sturges’s razor-sharp action scenes and grand Western vistas, as well as a showcase for a handful of iconic American movie stars and stars-to-be, including Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson. Victory belongs to these peasants.” The movie, itself a product of an arduous and exhausting production process by Kurosawa and his crew, acts as a parable about the triumph of community and collective action. Support from our readers helps us rely less on advertising, and keep our resource-intensive work free for everyone who needs it. The boutique fitness phenomenon sold exclusivity with a smile, until a toxic atmosphere and a push for growth brought the whole thing down. It’s not the only one. The difficulty of the shoot, and the sheer will it took to make it through, is evident in the final film, which plows through its extended running time with an intensity that is both brutal and measured. With Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio. 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