Prior to last week I had seen Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” exactly once, when I took a Kurosawa class in film school, and I spent the last 25 years telling myself to see it again. It’s easy for a 200-minute black-and-white foreign film to stay off the top of the list, ya know? But Lab111, Amsterdam’s answer to the Alamo Drafthouse, is running a Kurosawa retrospective¹. So on Friday night I decided my excuses were spent and skipped a truly excellent improv show to spend a big chunk of my night with the samurai.

Entire books have been written about the movie, and I’m not gonna add anything useful here. Its impact is both deep and wide. Its Wikipedia article is a film-history lesson. Any time you’ve ever seen a motley crew get together to save the imperiled villagers, from “The Three Amigos” to “The Avengers,” you can thank Kurosawa. The fact that it’s all so normal-seeming makes it hard to appreciate the norms that it’s inventing as it goes (“Citizen Kane” also has this problem). 

Though it’s extremely watchable—those 200 minutes fly by!—“Seven Samurai” is of course Japanese through-and-through, with many filmmaking choices that feel a bit dissonant to a Western audience. Most notable is the sudden swings in energy, with characters frequently both stoic and wailing in a single shot. It carries to Asakazu Nakai’s camera work, which has stunningly gorgeous, painterly images (the Lab111 showing was a 4K restoration) sharing time with kinetic moving-camera shots that you just can’t BELIEVE were accomplished before the invention of the Steadicam. 

It is naturally a product of its time, featuring few female characters and almost none with any agency. (The exception, however, might be the single most powerful moment of the movie. Rikichi’s kidnapped wife wakes to find herself surrounded by flames, and placidly chooses death over bondage, even as her husband races in vain to save her; the first of the samurai is killed in the resulting scuffle.) And you can easily recall the environment in which this film was shot—only nine years removed from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as recent to them as Trump’s election is to us. Monologues about defending the community at the cost of the individual have a bit more edge to them here than they might have in another time or place. 

Then there’s Toshiro Mifune. Few Westerners outside of film school know his name, which is a shame. To call Mifune one of the great film actors is putting it mildly. Imagine the attractiveness, humor, and magnetism of peak-era George Clooney combined with the intensity of Nicolas Cage and (especially in this movie) the manic childlike energy of… I don’t know, Chris Farley? He was a force of nature, and in “Seven Samurai,” he’s a chaos agent from beginning to end. Whole chunks of his performance were improvised (which you know I love). Several times in his uncaged line deliveries, Mifune wanders out of the camera’s focus area; that’s a feature, not a bug. Mifune and Kurosawa collaborated on 16 movies together before their tragic fallout, making them the John and Paul of filmmaking.

Many films have attempted to capture the brutality of war as well as “Seven Samurai” does. Vanishingly few have captured its surreal confusion so well.² The mounted bandits’ repeated assaults on the village are weirdly repetitive, and they repeatedly just ride back and forth among the defending villagers. It’s visually and narratively strange; so is war.

And when beloved characters start dying, it’s in fully unexpected ways. Having little memory of the plot from 25 years ago, I audibly gasped when one of the samurai went down—not just in his death, but how sudden and arbitrary it was, free of melodrama, without even a closeup on the character’s face. He was just gone. Moments later, another dropped in a similarly abrupt way. And then I felt genuine fear, a realization that nobody was safe. The last time I remember feeling such visceral dread for an ensemble was “Serenity.”

I can’t think of a conclusion smarter than “I really liked it because it’s really good.” But the range of movies I’ve mentioned in this short blogpost might make my point. I often mentally divide great art into one of two categories: the stuff that perfectly exemplifies the state of the art as it is (Vermeer, Madonna, Spielberg) and the stuff that brazenly pushes art forward whether you like it or not (Banksy, Björk, Jordan Peele). Like “Citizen Kane” or “Star Wars,” “Seven Samurai” is that rare artifact that manages to accomplish both in one movie. That’s why it’s on all these influential-movie lists. That’s why it should be.

1. Sadly not including Rashomon, my personal favorite and such a wild leap in storytelling that it feels 25 years ahead of its time.
2. One that springs to mind is “The Revenant,” where some fur traders are fighting for their lives while others are just walking by with as many pelts as they can carry.