The first thing you need to know about The Last Samurai (Dir Edward Zwick, 2003) is that no, Tom Cruise is not the titular character, Ken Watanabe is. And as a sub-header to this point, this is also Watanabe’s movie; not as far as screen time, but in terms of strength of performance, strength of character, and narrative importance.
Which leads to the second thing you need to know…
This movie fucking rocks, and it would have been 100 times better without the Tom Cruise character. Whether or not that movie could have been made? I don’t know/I doubt it, but it would have been a better film.
For a Japanese movie that takes place in the same time period, and addresses some similar cultural issues, watch Twilight Samurai.
The third thing you need to know is that Zwick, who directed Glory, and went on after this to direct Defiance (the based on a true story about Belarusian Jews living in the woods to escape the Nazis, also a very good movie), knows how to have his cake and eat it too.
These three movies all share depictions of justified violence, and do so in exciting ways, but lean just enough into the human cost of violence and not the futility of war, but the waste of humanity and human life that encompasses it. All while also showing how dehumanizing and brutal we can be to each other.
In this movie Cruise plays Captain Civil War Hero, a veteran not just of the Civil War, but of the genocidal military actions that made up post war westward expansion. This isn’t me re-framing anything or being glib, the movie does this without my help, and very clearly states that what happened was genocide.
It’s 1876 and Captain War Hero is a traumatized alcoholic who like all good American white saviors, is also deeply fascinated by American indigenous peoples and their cultures and wrote about them.
He starts the movie as a spokesman foe the Winchester firearms company, on a traveling show where is is unraveling, recklessly firing off his rifle, and hitting bottom.
Then, he is hired by the Empire of Japan to train and modernize their armies, and put down their own renegades and uprisings. He’s hired, not just because of his military acumen, but because of his experience studying American indigenous peoples, and then being pulled into the genocide that made up those military actions.
He goes over there, gets captured in a battle against the renegade Samurai, is treated like a human being and studied by his captor, Ken Watanabe, and starts to immerse himself into the rural, feudal culture of Japan.
He is befriended by the people there, does his best to learn the culture and the language, gest trained to fight by them, and is along for the ride as Watanabe’s character, who is trying to maintain Japanese culture and not surrender to western identity and modernization, tries to make peace with the Emperor, and then is there when both sides collide in the final, pointless, bloody conclusion.
There’s plenty of hero moments for Cruise’s character, and he is the main character and point of view of the story, and he does help, but he’s not the engine of events, he’s just this guy that’s there.
Like I said, he’s the sidekick as main character, rolling along in a more interesting movie than the one that got made.
But make no mistake, he’s a white savior in a white savior movie, he just happens o be the savior by being the witness, even tough his story is told by another white witness who also provides the opening and closing voiceovers.
Now, here’s why it’s the best white savior movie.
First and foremost, as I said, he’s just along for the ride, and he does his best to try and champion Watanabe’s character’s story. Everyone loses, everyone is hurt, nothing is saved, he’s not the one to rally the troops or turn the tidr, and even though the Emperor changes his mind about making an arms and trade deal with America… I mean… tangent time….
The Japanese have an imperial history to rival, or perhaps surpass our own in some ways, and I’m not even talking about World War 2. Our imperial histories helped us come together in Japanese post war reconstruction, and one of the reasons our cultures share so much culture is that there’s enough alike there to build a bridge. We’re different, we’re very different, but we have a ton in common.
Please note the above paragraph is very broad, which fits for this very broad movie.
…as I was saying, yes he succeeds at carrying Watanabe’s character’s story forward, and it matters, but it doesn’t change anything, and the course of history reveals that. And while Cruise returns to the village at the end, and to the widow/implied love interest that took care of him, after he widowed her in the first battle… look, all his character stuff is pretty rote white savior here… okay, now would be a good time to talk about white saviors.
The white savior, the usually white guy, shows up in another culture, integrates that culture into themselves, or imposes their culture on to the others, and together with this hybrid carried on the white savior’s shoulders, an oppressor is cast off, an enemy is defeated, etc. and this all comes out of cultural othering.
When we other, we both diminish and heighten, the magic/mystery/alien/and novel of the other is something that completes or enhances the white savior, while their culture is something that modernizes, and/or corrects the host culture.
At it’s best, it’s a kind of benign imperialism, the othered culture exists to be cultivated for the white savior’s gain, and that the white savior’s cultural primacy is what’s required for the othered to grow, and thrive.
In the Last Samurai, Cruise’s character is just there to watch his culture do what it does best, destroy on an industrial scale. His personal experience is what matters, not his cultural identity.
But, it’s also a question of cultural tourism, and of fleeing to find salvation and wholeness in the other. It’s not a bad thing to say that he needs to leave the world that traumatized him, but it’s not great to say that salvation is in the wisdom of the other.
And while the movie does present that from a trope perspective, in the world of the movie, it’s made of discrete events that are shown, articulated, and applied. He also has to change to learn, before he can learn to change. So, as a discrete element, as a singular thing detached from the whole of and traditions of the white savior genre, it’s pretty good and as respectable as you can get.
So if you want to watch a cool period piece with a lot of rad action scenes, and you want to watch Tom Cruise get his ass beat frequently, The Last Samurai is an exciting and enjoyable, almost inoffensive watch, that suffered from being jumping to conclusion based on the title, the tropes, and not the context.
(Also, obviously Lawrence of Arabia is a better movie. I shouldn’t have to say that.)
(Also also, I wrote this while watching Tár with Cate Blantchet, which I’m watching because I am also fancy, and because I love her.)