Review - Movie - Seven Samurai (1954) - 8/10

[imdb 8.8/10] [wikipedia] [metacritic 99/100] [rotten tomato 100/100]
[director - Akira Kurosawa imdb/wikipedia]

A village of poor farmers are helpless at the demand of bandits who are pushing them to the brink of starvation with their demands. It seems they have an impossible struggle trying to find a mercenary samurai to help them with only rice as payment but luckily they come across a charismatic and sympathetic samurai who is willing to help.

The cast of characters are each interesting and entertaining in their own right and they all have enough depth to make them believeable as they bond and interact with each other, the different personalities within the group take up their role and play their vital part towards the film's built up progression to the dramatic finale (Kikuchiyo is f**king nuts and all the more fun to watch for it!). Each of the samurai within the group appear to have different motives for accepting the seemingly futile job offer.

I really like how the samurai and villagers have a genuine struggle and are so vulnerable and under constant threat. I hate how in some movies where no matter what is thrown at your protagonist they never really seem in any real danger and you never doubt their eventual success, this is certainly not the case here and only makes the movie more authentic.

The leader of the group Kambei Shimada (actor Takashi Shimura imdb/wikipedia, reminds me of a Japanese Morgan Freeman a bit) is sympathetic to the villagers and agrees to help recruit more samurai, he is sombre and good natured throughout the film and his manner is always reasonable making him a solid leader for the samurai. Watching Kambei's and the other samurai's clever defensive plans come to life with the help of the villagers is extremely rewarding as they all are fighting together so hard to stop the bandits, eventually we see the villagers have been transformed and trained to stand up for themselves whatever the cost and are no longer the fearful peasants we saw at the start of the movie.

I didn't know an awful lot about the man before watching the film, it was co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. Though the film is very long there is no scene that seems out of place or aimlessly drawn out, every moment serves to further the plot and never seems pointless.

I watched it at first just because the film is always held in extremely high esteem so I thought I would give it a chance and see what it was about, plus it's about samurai and the fighting scenes are mega! 8/10