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Movie Review: The Twilight Samurai

Tasogare Seibei, or The Twilight Samurai, is a samurai anti-epic. Rather than romanticizing the last days of the samurai culture—just before the Meiji Restoration circa 1865—it paints a realistic portrait of the hard life of a low-level samurai named Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada), and how honor and duty do not always mix well with happiness and the content life. Going into the movie with Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai in mind, it was interesting to see how two stories that share so many things in common—same time period, same themes of love, honor, and self-discipline, even the same actor—could be so different. Where The Last Samurai handles everything with a Hollywood flourish, a “meaningful” ending, and an epic-style simplicity, Yoji Yamada’s quieter story focuses on the characters and the realistic way they must go about their daily lives in those changing times.

There’s not much action in this movie, despite its “samurai movie” tag, so don’t go into this one thinking you’ll find decapitated heads and gouts of blood. What you’ll find instead is a touching story that won’t leave you with an implanted feeling of nostalgia for the samurai reign. The Twilight Samurai is told with wonderful characters, a subtle narrative voice, and yes, a sword fight or two in there somewhere.