'Seven Samurai' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: The Criterion Collection (2024)

Decades after its initial release, Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai is still one of the great pieces of popular art, a work of transcendent cinema as well as an intensely pleasurable movie in every sense of the word. Running like greased lightning despite its three-and-a-half-hour running time, Kurosawa’s film is the Rosetta stone of modern American action, influencing Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and countless others. A fable from the past that reverberates just as viscerally in the present, Seven Samurai is so assured that it feels timeless.

Kurosawa’s 1954 epic, produced in the middle of one of the more extraordinary run of films that any filmmaker has ever enjoyed, is a fluid balance of vast scale and intimate human emotions. Seven Samurai is much lighter on its feet than you might expect from a canonical landmark, a tall tale with a lot of room for the sort of comedy and bluster and ball-busting that can, say, inspire one to follow a comrade into the battlefield. It’s ribald, irreverent, violent, even horny, but it also flickers with a grace and tranquility. This volatile mixture of the barroom and the arthouse is also one of many signs of Kurosawa’s fealty to an American icon, John Ford.

Kurosawa can stage an elaborate raid on a village that might make even Ford blush, and he can fashion a close-up of a battered woman in the morning light that’s worthy in its majestic empathy of the imagery of Carl Theodor Dreyer or fellow countryman Mizoguchi Kenji. Perhaps the central overwhelming power of Seven Samurai resides in the fact that it feels like every movie ever made, all at once and all superbly. There’s a too-much-ness to everything in the film, from the kinetic filmmaking fervor to the extravagant soulfulness of the actors.

Seven Samurai is set in the 1600s, when Japan was in the grip of civil wars. Bandits and warlords roam and pillage the countryside, while the killing of feudal lords leads to unemployed samurai, or ronin, who essentially work on a freelance basis. Even in a wandering state, the samurai belong among a higher class than, say, the desperate farming villages that are caught in the crosshairs between famine, destruction, and the whims of armed and trained interlopers.

Kurosawa sets up the story in minutes. Horses gallop across a country landscape, their hooves resounding like thunder. Atop them are bandits, who look down upon a village that sits at the bottom of a topographical bowl formed by the surrounding hills. They will sack the village again later, when it has replenished its crops. Exhausted with exploitation, the villagers decide after much debate to hire samurai to defend their community when the bandits return.

The hiring of a band of warriors by innocents is an established trope in various genres now, though few filmmakers have brought the idea to life as rigorously as Kurosawa. Much of the film’s first hour is devoted to the cultural tensions between civilians and samurai, to the recruiting of the samurai in a nearby city, and to the gradual formation of the warriors as a unit. There are hijinks, as well as an unresolved coil of resentment existing between the villagers and the samurai, who could be rapists and thieves themselves in another context.

The villagers fear the samurai, while some of the samurai fight the urge to condescend to the villagers as weak and hypocritical. Existing as a bridge between the worlds is Kikuchiyo (Mifune Toshiro), a former villager who blustered his way into the fighting caste. Drunken and overflowing with overcompensating macho energy, Kikuchiyo suggests a clown, with an enormous sword that he carries over his shoulder like a bat.

It would be easy to write the character off as comic relief. In the tradition of Shakespeare’s fools, though, Kikuchiyo often utters sentiments of shocking perception just when he appears to be at the apex of his idiocy. His foolishness masks a deep well of pain and empathy which, in part, means that he’s actually the least likely to pity the villagers. He expects them to rise to his level.

Mifune’s extraordinary performance in Seven Samurai brings to the fore a commonality between him and Kurosawa: an ability to be simultaneously big and visceral and minute and subtle. Orson Welles has this talent, as an actor as well as a director, and the exact and relentless instinct that these men have for points and counterpoints imbues their work with a robustness of detail that’s exhilarating. All of Kikuchiyo’s buffoonery here is laced with pathos, and vice versa. The man’s speech to the other samurai, imploring them to feel for the villagers and their demoralization, is something like the Tom Joad speech of Japanese cinema, and Mifune imbues these words with a fury and heartbreak that threatens to shatter the screen.

Kurosawa is in turn a master of oscillation, escalation, pace, variety, in terms of the length of scenes and shots and the use of aural and visual leitmotifs to tightly braid all parts of this enormous movie together. Each image reveals something about plot and character, as does each edit. Kurosawa cuts to movement, and to the speed and direction of the eyes of his characters, a formal flourish that subtly draws us into the narrative and spices up exposition with sensory excitement. Wed that editing to the rich deep-focus landscapes and expressive close-ups and shadowy lighting and indefatigably inventive acting of Kurosawa’s stock company, and you’ve got a film that feels not only alive but barely governable. It’s dynamite sitting in your lap.

The samurai agree to defend the villagers for a handful of rice a day. It’s a point of honor, embodied by the nuanced leadership of Kambei (Shimura Takashi), that Kurosawa endlessly complicates. Kambei and the other samurai do a complex job well, essentially for its own sake, and are either destroyed or live to remain alienated while life for the village renews.

The violence of Seven Samurai, among the most accomplished in all of cinema, is somehow cathartic and anticlimactic. Kurosawa builds intricate and spatially lucid set pieces that show the work of attrition that is guerilla warfare. You’re allowed to discover for yourself what the young Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) learns: that war is less glamour than terror and drudgery.

When the final battle occurs amid biblical rainfall—there’s no other kind of rainfall in Kurosawa’s cinema—we’re as exhausted by the plight of the villagers and samurai as we are elated by the filmmaker’s brilliance. There’s a sense of extraordinary waste, of kineticism burning itself out, which leads to a profound moment when someone is almost disappointed to hear that the bandits are all finally dead. Without violence, these men of violence are again wanderers, and the gratitude of the villagers is fleeting. The humanism of this masterpiece is hard-won. Seven Samurai is a boy’s adventure with the wisdom of a wise, battered old soul.

Image/Sound

I detected softness in some of the landscape shots of this 4K upgrade. This could be attributable to the transfer’s source, as that same softness was also evident on Criterion’s prior release of the film. Close-ups and foreground and middle-ground imagery, though, enjoy a noticeable uptick in clarity and depth. Black levels are velvety rich, while the whites are also a little soft in places. That said, the whites in the close-ups of the actors faces, especially the light that Kurosawa labored to have visible in their eyes, is quite sharp. Image details are generally extraordinary, from the fabrics of clothes to the materials of the buildings to the mud and rain and fire.

The two soundtracks included here, a Japanese LPCM 1.0 and Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0, are the same ones that appeared on Criterion’s 2010 release, and while I prefer the former for its representation of how the film was presented, both are dynamic and enveloping.

Extras

While these supplements are all ported over from Criterion’s prior edition of Seven Samurai, they’re so formidable that the lack of new material doesn’t matter. The archival audio commentary is among the best I’ve heard, with Japanese film expert Michael Jack offering a lively dive into the formal sophistication of the film and the culture that influenced it. Maybe it’s a bit wonky for normies, but it’s pure heroin for cinephiles. The other audio commentary is a bit patchier, as it was pieced together from various sources, but it includes a murderer’s row of scholars and experts such as Donald Richie, Tony Rayns, Stephen Prince, David Desser, and Joan Mellon, and as such is a valuable one-stop shop for a wealth of discussion about the film.

“Seven Samurai: Origins and Influences” is a 55-minute featurette produced by Criterion that includes many of the same folks from the second commentary, elaborating on the samurai culture on which Kurosawa was riffing with the film. “Akira Kurosawa: It’s Wonderful to Create” is a 50-minute archival documentary that offers a fascinating glimpse of the making of Seven Samurai, particularly the writing of the script, which gestated over a couple of failed projects and was then hammered out over a period of 45 days, with constant revising and note-taking. There’s also the documentary “My Life in Cinema: Akira Kurosawa” in which the filmmaker is interviewed by the also quite formidable Japanese auteur Oshima Nagisa.

Behind-the-scenes promotional materials, including production stills and a gallery of rare posters, round out the bounty of extras, along with a booklet that includes tributes by Kenneth Turan, Peter Cowie, Philip Kemp, Peggy Chiao, Alain Silver, Arthur Penn, and Sidney Lumet, as well as an interview with actor Toshiro Mifune from 1993.

Overall

Most movies look positively robotic and undernourished next to the swaggering, moving, endlessly inventive, and influential Seven Samurai.