Burchell's Travels: The Life, Art and Journeys of William John Burchell, 1781-1863
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Just over 200 years ago, in 1810, a 30-year-old Englishman named William Burchell landed in Cape...
Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing?
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Francis Crozier was a major figure in the epic quests of nineteenth-century Polar exploration -...
Tamed: 10 Species That Changed Our World
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10 species that changed our world...For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors depended on...
The Longest Siege: Tobruk: The Battle That Saved North Africa
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Beginning on 10th April 1941, and lasting for 240 days, the siege of Tobruk is a mesmerising tale of...
The House in Smyrna
Tatiana Salem Levy and Alison Entrekin
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In Rio de Janeiro, a woman suffering from a mysterious illness, which is eroding her body and mind,...
Space Dumplins
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"Like the twisted lovechild of Jack Kirby and Dr Seuss, Craig Thompson has created a new genre: the...
The Figure in the Carpet
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'Did she know and if she knew would she speak?' The story of an unsolved literary mystery that...
The Sins of the Father
8.0
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New York, 1939. Tom Bradshaw is arrested for first degree murder. He stands accused of killing his...
Godzilla (2014)
6.7
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In this gritty, realistic sci-fi action epic, Godzilla returns to its roots as one of the world's...
David McK (3663 KP) rated The Last Samurai (2003) in Movies
Feb 6, 2021
And this.
Which is a strong contender for one of the best of those films.
The film stars Tom Cruise (who, for once, is not playing Tom Cruise) and Ken Wattanabe, with the former a world weary US Civil War veteran (suffering from PTSD?) who is hired to train the modernising Japanese army, and the latter a Samurai leader who thinks Japan is losing its identity; moving too fast into the future.
Captured by that Samurai leader following an early battle, Algren (Cruise's character) soon finds himself beginning to wonder is he fighting in the right side...
Yes, the plot is somewhat akin to 'Dances with Wolves' (or even 'Avatar'), and I've heard the charge of the film being a White Saviour story - a charge, I have to say, that I do NOT find any merit in: indeed, I would argue the opposite (that Cruise's character is saved rather than the one doing the saving) is more true.