Two greedy bumbling peasants find gold in a stick one day, and go hunting for the rest. A mysterious man comes across their camp, and ends up leading them to a hidden fortress. He’s secretly a famous general, and he uses the idiots plans to get home to try and return a princess and her fortune to their kingdom.
The Hidden Fortress of the title being a bit of a small catalyst to the whole story. Going in I thought this would be about attacking some kind of hidden fortress as I thought that was where the Star Wars influence would come in. That’s because I don’t look to see what films are about all the time.
The shared themes are actually the feisty princess and the story being told with the main characters being a couple of lowly muppets. The two farmer loser soldiers are R2D2 and C3PO. They can be funny at times, a bit annoying at others. What people seem to forget with all the Jar Jar hatred is that Threepio can be a complete twat sometimes so Lucas nailed that.
But this isn’t a Star Wars review.
This is my third Kurosawa movie, and the third good one. It looks great. I’ll say that BFI arsed up a bit with the subs at times again. There’s patches that aren’t translated, and we never get to see all the lyrics to the fire ceremony song which is very important to the third act of the film. Bad BFI. But they are putting these films out so I can’t grumble too much.
While this is great, I do have a few niggles. Tahei and Matakishi, the two farmers, are pretty one note. They aren’t hugely funny, but a bit in a slap stick kind of way. I would have liked a bit more progression for the two of them but its not my movie. Also, the big lance fight between Makabe and Tadokoro was a bit too long but that’s partly to me being used to modern day action than anything else really. It IS realistic, which is nice. Oh and the princess doesn’t have much range, she kind of barks most of her lines which is fine generally but didn’t fit for one scene. That isn’t a Japanese thing really, I’ve seen similar moments played out better.
The good is that its well paced. It looks great and your kept interested throughout, which seeing as it’s a movie about hauling some gold could have easily not been the case. This being a Kurosawa movie you also have a performance by Toshiro Mifune. He’s a bad ass in this film, a complete and utter bad ass. Essentially, to get back to Star Wars, he’s the Obi Wan character but more in his prime than A New Hope Obi Wan. Under a lesser actor he would have either been a one note guy or not believable as a legendary general. Mifune is a master though.
Like any Kurosawa movie I’ll review, if you don’t like subtitles, black and white (that might not apply to all of them) or Japanese cinema then you won’t like this. If you like good old movies or are any level of film fan you will. Great stuff.
Next up: Monsters vs Aliens
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