Lucky Seven?

Among real cinephiles ("rank-and-cinephiles?"), few movies are held in higher regard than Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. It's a real ur-film that forever altered the movies that followed, inspiring directors with its style, being referenced in countless scenes, and even being remade whole-cloth (as The Magnificent Seven). It was a big gap in my film experience, and at last I've closed it.

Now, I can spend the rest of my days apologizing for not liking Seven Samurai whenever the subject comes up.

Certainly, I see the visual appeal. It is gorgeous, and while you could say that with qualifiers ("for a black-and-white movie" or "for an older film"), there's really no need to apply any qualifiers. It's gorgeous, full stop. Even today, when directors have visual effects to polish their scenes to an obscene degree, few movies capture the beauty of Seven Samurai. Any random image from the movie could be framed on a gallery wall. And for many movie watchers, these kinds of striking visuals are the measure by which you can recognize a great film.

I'm not really one of these people. I need to get caught up in the story to really love a movie. And while Seven Samurai does have plenty of story, it's rolled out a glacial pace. It's a staggering 3 hours and 27 minutes long (including the intermission), and unfolds more like a TV mini-series than a film. There are several subplots (excised when it was remade into The Magnificent Seven) that to me don't so much flesh out the world as delay the conclusion of the story. I had to break the movie up into multiple sittings to make it through, and even then I found my attention wavering.

The acting is often wild and over-the-top. Was Kurosawa making a movie he knew would be seen by Western audiences, and deliberately encouraging bold performances that would transcend language? Is this style typical of all Japanese movies of the period? Or does this movie just happen to feature a couple of hammy actors pitching their performances at a different level from everyone else? For whatever the reason, there were some characters (quite central to the story) that I found hard to take seriously; this in turn made it a challenge for me to stick with the movie after the first hour.

Knowing how beloved this movie is, it's hard for me to confess that I really did not like it. But knowing how influential it is (and easily recognizing that influence), I can at least salvage something from the experience of watching it. I think that would work out to something like a D. Yes, that's a low score for one of the most highly-regarded movies ever made... but I really think I'd recommend watching it only as a bit of film history, to people who would truly appreciate that history.

You may commence with your ridicule.