I’ve had Seven Samurai sitting around for a few months now and I finally put it in and watched it all the way through. I had previously made the mistake of trying to put it in at 1am (twice), not knowing how long the film was (3 hours and 20 minutes) I fell asleep both times. But this weekend I sat down much earlier with the intent of watching Akira Kurosawa’s film all the way through.

Finally. An old classic which is thrown around in the whole “greatest films ever” conversations that wasn’t disapointing! Maybe it wasn’t disapointing because so much of modern cinema draws on this film. Other than the obvious western adaptation/translation The Magnificent Seven we see Kurosawa’s plot of gathering a rag-tag group of heroes to acomplish something or defeat an enemy everywhere today. Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan, Ocean’s Eleven, Star Wars, The Matrix, Independance Day even Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring of the same year (1954) follows a similar storyline of gathering heroes for a task. Kurosawa also pioneered the use of slow motion in action sequences.

This film was done so well I kept thinking to myself he did that in 1954!? The Samurai have to defend a small village against a large group of bandits and during a long sequence in the film we get the foundation for every “defend the fort” movie I’ve ever seen (13th Warrior, Kingdom of Heaven, The Alamo, Last of the Mohicans, etc.). At times I felt like you do when you hear the original song after having only heard the Weird Al version, thinking to yourself “that’s where that comes from.”

Altogether a great movie, with an excellent and foundational story we use often today and wonderful cinematography. I can’t wait to see Kurosawa’s 1950’s classic Rashomon next.