by Billy Russell

I don’t like to think of myself as a film snob, because, ugh. I hate to be the person who can’t enjoy a fluffy, inconsequential, even predictable movie because there are so many great movies out there, and why would I waste my time with something so pedestrian? As though it’s impossible to enjoy Dumb and Dumber and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in equal measure.

Even still, I like to be well-versed in the classics. Whenever Criterion has its 50% sale, I like to load up on some of my favorites, even on some titles I’ve never seen, but want to own so that even if I don’t necessarily think the movie itself is for me, I can load up on the special features and understand what makes it a “great” film.

For years, I was kind of embarrassed that one big gap in my film-watching resume has been The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa’s epic. It was just never a good time! It’s just around three-and-a-half hours long, and I’m no philistine, I don’t avoid movies with subtitles like some idiot, but three-and-a-half hours of reading subtitles is gonna make me sleepy. Hell, maybe I am an idiot, but I had my reasons.

Worse yet, I’d seen most of the movies inspired by Seven Samurai’s basic plot of recruiting badasses to defend a pathetic little group in need of help: Most notably Magnificent Seven, which is the closest in its parade of imitators to a remake (the original writers aren’t given a story-by credit). But then there’s also Battle Beyond the Stars, a Roger Corman production with great set design by James Cameron, who wound up making some movies about battling robots and one about a giant boat. I’d even seen A Bug’s Life, the Pixar flick, before getting around to seeing the real-deal original.

It had gotten to a point where I’d gone so long without seeing The Seven Samurai I wondered if I even needed to see it. I’d seen all of its imitators, I’ve seen it parodied through pop culture. I figured it was one of those movies you could see without really having to see, like Pulp Fiction, in a way. But one day, this last October, my friend asked me for some Halloween recommendations and he casually dropped that he’d never seen the original Halloween, a great movie, Hitchockian without being hyperbolic, so genius in its plotting it spawned an entire genre. Even if he’d seen all the awful sequels, all the awful imitators, I thought he would get a kick out of the original. So, I thought, what the hell? Let’s do this thing.

A couple of weeks before its usual 50% sale, Criterion had a surprise one-day sale, so I jumped on it and got The Seven Samurai. With the pandemic raging, I converted my spare bedroom into a little private screening room. This is the room for watching movies like The Seven Samurai. This is a phone-free zone. This is when you need to sit your ass in silence and let a movie wash over you. Lights off, soundbar cranked, lava lamp doing its little dance, you devote yourself entirely to the movie.

Three-and-a-half hours later, I emerged, giddy, exhausted and thrilled. What a goddamned movie. I would describe it as two halves, equally great. The first half sets the stage, introduces us to the characters, the threat and the strategies that will be employed to defeat the enemy. The second half, which I thought was sort of amazing for a movie as old as it was (made in 1954), is almost nonstop action. There are highs and lows and I genuinely had no idea what to expect. Akira Kurosawa and his writers do such a good job stacking the odds against the villagers that I wondered if the bandits might actually win. Whether the bandits win or not, you will see, doesn’t matter. What matters is how the battle is fought.

The Seven Samurai is exciting and ultimately ponderous and profound in a way I’ve seen oft-imitated in movies that have followed, but never really lived up to the original. Kurosawa has a message about bravery and war, and he lets the action speak for itself. He doesn’t surrender to preachiness about the futility of war or the inherent ugliness of man. If that’s what war means to you, that’s what the movie will mean to you. If you think that war in the face of a cause you believe in requires untold bravery, you’ll come away with that message, too. But Kurosawa doesn’t play both sides, he doesn’t try to have his cake and eat it, too. It’s that war is a nuanced thing. It can’t be easily defined as good or bad. There are good things, there are bad things, there are bad people who do good things and there are good people who are capable of committing atrocities. There is no need to hammer us, the viewer, over the head with these details. He stages the action and allows it to play out.

At the very end, when we see who has lived and who has died, and all that has been won and lost, it all feels a bit empty. The Seven Samurai is rightly considered one of the best movies ever made, and the Criterion Blu-ray transfer is a sight to behold. It’s gorgeous.