[KFCC] 7 Samurai Review

Story: A small village in the country side always gets raided by bandits after the harvest. The scared villagers decide to hire some samurai to defend the village. Unfortunately the villagers are so poor the only thing they can offer is 3 square meals a day. Four farmers travel to a major city looking for samurai to hire but they are met with failure every time. One day they come across a samurai that saves a child from a thief for free, they manage to convince him to help. Kambei helps the farmers hire other samurai to help defend the village, after a few days they have the fighting force that they need and travel to the village. The samurai prepare the village and the farmers for the upcoming battle with the bandits.

Review: If there is only a single samurai movie you can watch in your life, it should be Seven Samurai. This is an epic classic tale of poor farmers and brave samurai that risk their lives to help them. This film is not comparable to modern day samurai movies as it is in a class on it own. This film was release in 1954, in those days movies were a different things. There is no special effects or unbelievable sword play, it is a simple movie that tells a story. Every detail from start to finish is seen in this movie and that what makes this film so long, over 3 hours to be exact but its worth every minute of it. The story is straight foward, there are no complicated plots only the fight for survival of these poor farmers.

The greatest quality of this film are the characters, there is little background for them but you see them develop during the course of the story and slowly you become attached to them. Even those that you know very little have the same effect and you don't want anything bad to happen. There is an onscreen chemistry between these characters, perhaps they are just good actors but they are really believable as a band of samurai. There is the true friendship between them that is not always believable in a movie. Also the acting quality is very high as the emotions that they are feeling shine through the facial expressions and words. There only thing we would like to mention that there is nothing on the bandits, they are only this enemy they must defend again and nothing more is known about them.

This movie is more of a drama than it is an action movie. It is only near the end of the film that you really see any fighting but its not like in other movies, there are no fancy moves or anything like that. The sword fights are basically real, like they would have been if it was a real event. You'd expect to watch a samurai movie for incredible swordplay and fights but in the case of this film that is not the point to it, the fights just blend into the background along with everything else in the movie and all together they make this film a true classic.

The subtitles in this film are perfect, we had no trouble understanding every single word. Its hard to sum up the review on this film, it is an old classic and so many people said so much about it. This kind of movie is truly rare today, there is something about the movie that makes it great but its not something you can easily identify. It comes down to the vision of the director and also a different way of making movie because today most movie rely on big budgets, big special effects and big stars. This wait for a movie full of action or fancy swordplay, this is a very long movie with a extremely well developed story. If old black and white movies don't scare you, then you should give this one a try.