It’s a weird movie. Tom Cruise plays an army man who served under Custer, murdering the gentle Indian peoples of North America. He hates Custer, and he hates his lieutenant colonel, who served Custer so unquestioningly. He feels guilty about killing all those Indians–and indeed, the rest of his post-Indian-wars life has been an alcoholic, self-destructive ramble towards rock bottom, hawking Winchesters at carnivals and delivering lines like “you have NO IDEA……..what…….I’ve done.” However, he also seems to harbor an intense hate for the process of scalping, which he talks a lot about. I found this confusing.

Then the Emperor of Japan hires him to train an army to kill these Samurai rebels that blew up some railroad tracks in rural Japan. I know!

So he rides a boat over there, and on the way he writes in his journal, “I am off, to once again suppress the rebellion of a tribal people. It seems that this is the only job for which I am cut out.” This all happens within the first 8-9 minutes of the film, so we are quickly set up with the entire concept and we can now predict with 90% accuracy exactly what will happen in the remaining 2+ hours:

1. He will encounter the rebellious tribal peoples, and will realize that their honor and bravery far surpass his own troops–there will be lots of parallels in flashback-form to the Indians he massacred. The Samurai, in turn, will be impressed by this American’s bravery, and how he keeps getting up, Cool Hand Luke style, no matter how many times they hit him in the kidneys with various heavy objects.

2. He will be captured by them; then, “Shogun”-style, he will be taken under the wing of the entire village, who will teach him the language, customs, and bitchin’ Samurai fighting styles of their ancestors (unlike “Shogun,” however, there will be no decree issued that says if the American (Englishman) does not learn Japanese within one month, the entire village will be crucified).

3. He will fall in love with either (a) a Samurai’s wife or (b) a Samurai’s widow. If it’s the wife, it will create a jealous/homoerotic subplot about “what of our friendship even though we speak not the same tongue” with the husband that will culminate in one or the other of them saving one or the other’s life and/or Tom Cruise holding the Samurai while he dies bravely, forgiving him with his last breath (never the other way around–the Samurai would never hold Tom Cruise while Tom Cruise died). If it’s the widow, then probably it will turn out that Tom Cruise is the one who killed her husband, in that first battle when he was captured. But because she is Japanese, and inscrutable, this won’t come up for awhile, and she will always be demure and respectful, until near the end–possibly before the final battle scene–when they will either have confusingly hot sex or else there will be a scene that awkwardly conflates war with sex (like, she kneels and gives him her dead husband’s sword (penis), or possibly she commits seppuku right in front of him, which is also pretty hot if you think about it)

4. There will be a big, hopeless battle, where there will be like 500 Samurai fighting against thousands and thousands of Imperial troops. Get it? JUST LIKE CUSTER. Tom Cruise will feel great about this, because he is finally fighting on the side of right.

5. He will manage to kill his old commanding officer with a sword at some point. He will also somehow be the last person living when the battle is over, and then the entire Imperial army will kneel and touch their heads to the ground in honor of his honor.

Okay that last part I only know from watching the film. But the rest was all prediction!

I am pretty tired of this kind of movie. It fronts as this whole “cultural understanding” thing but really it is still just about how awesome America is. The Japanese are constantly committing seppuku, talking about committing seppuku, or begging their Lord to allow them to commit sepuku. Tom Cruise finds this practice barbaric, of course, because in America we like to continue living no matter what shame we have brought upon our family. He tries to talk the Samurai lord out of committing seppuku, but when the Lord asks him to stop forcing his culture on him, he then HELPS the lord commit seppuku. There is also this really confusing part where the Samurai lord is talking about “karma,” which, as far as I know, is not a traditional Japanese concept but rather an Indian one.

Oh, so, yeah. As far as my predictions:

-Tom Cruise learns to be the best Samurai ever in approximately 5 months, proving that it’s actually not that hard to be a Samurai warrior

-there is a cool, totally unexplained scene of a surprise ninja attack, and when it happened I said out loud, “ninjas!” but then no one ever explained who they were or why they were trying to kill the Lord. But still, ninjas! Tom Cruise easily defeats them, of course, even though……….THEY ARE NINJAS.

-as it turns out, it was the “widow of a man killed by Tom Cruise” option, and she nurses him back to health and then he shows her how much better life is when you’ve got an American man by your side (helping carry baskets, mostly, which “Japanese men do not do.” (“I am not Japanese.”)).

-the final war = sex montage between them involves her dressing him in her dead husband’s armor (after undressing him first, if you know what I mean (literally)) and then crying while he stands looking stoically out the window.

There is also the classic “old ways are better than new ways” stuff with “our new howitzer guns!” mowing down Samurai after Samurai, and their horses, it’s horrible inhuman rat-a-tat-tatting beating out the rhythm of certain doom for all the cowards who use guns instead of swords (the Japanese Imperial howitzer-master’s face crumpling as he begins crying and probably thinking some weird Japanese version of “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”), etc.

But then at the end, after everyone is dead but Tom Cruise, we cut to six months later, and he suddenly comes staggering (he’s been horribly wounded, of course) into the Imperial chamber, and just by looking at the Emperor he changes the whole course of Japanese fiscal policy, which was the only thing the Samurai wanted in the first place. So why did they have that big war?? Tom Cruise is like, “if his majesty considers me his enemy, he may order me to take my own life right now.” So, Tom Cruise has been effectively Japanese-ized, because he’s stoked to kill himself all the time for no reason, but he’s BETTER than the Japanese, because he has that American know-how and can talk the Emperor into doing stuff that even the Samurai Lord was unable to. Plus, since when does Tom Cruise give a shit about the Emperor? Jesus.

But then, my favorite part! “No one knows what became of the American after that,” says the voice-over. But WE know, don’t we? Yeah! He goes back to the village! The village where the 500 Samurai were from. And every single one of those 500 Samurai have died in battle, suffering a horrendous defeat at the hands of the Emperor. And that was six months ago. So the village had no one left in it but women and children. Who, if we are going to be strictly accurate in falling in line with this whole “noble obsession with seppuku in old-timey Japan” plot point that the film has such a boner for, would ALL HAVE KILLED THEMSELVES after hearing of the defeat. Instead, they are just, like, hoeing vegetables and shooing chickens away like normal. So it’s pretty lucky that Tom Cruise’s Japanese lady didn’t disembowel herself with a sword before he had the chance to come back and have sex with her finally.

Tom Cruise truly became……………THE LAST SAMURAI.