[Rant]47 Ronin

[Ancient History]

So, I just got from seeing the movie 47 Ronin, starring Keanu Reeves. It is one of the most aggressively mediocre films I have seen from Hollywood in quite some time, and I would like to rant about it. There are spoilers ahead.

This isn't a bad movie. Which is a weird thing to say, because I want it to be bad. I want to hate it. But it's not a bad movie. There's great scenery, decent costumes, reasonable acting and special effects, and the plot is taken from what is pretty much the de facto Japanese national epic. Which might be where the problems begin.

The story of the 47 Ronin is simple, powerful, and has been adapted many times in many media - indeed, Stan Sakai (creator of Usagi Yojimbo) - did a bad-ass comic book adaptation of it not too long ago. It's also absolutely not a nice story; it's a story about appearances and deception, unjust laws carried out by a ruthless government, and ultimately bloody revenge and acceptance of death. It's the kind of story where one of the characters will disown his wife and go live with a prostitute and get the shit kicked out of him just to convince the bad guys he's out of the game.

It's also, as I mentioned, explicitly about 47 masterless samurai. So where does that bring Keanu Reeves, who is clearly not Japanese? Well...they basically took a knife to the story and gut-fucked a hole in it then tried to shove Keanu into the movie as a tengu-trained halfbreed with magical badass swordery.

The thing is, this is not bad. Okay, yes, you've got this weird fantasy Japan thing going on and Keanu is a halfbreed woodsman type who had been raised by magic bird-monks in the forest; that kind of works. It's not perfect by any means, in fact large parts of it are just bizarre, but setting the 47 Ronin in fantasy Japan with witches and six-eyed demon-elk things could have been awesome. Keanu actually does some fun fighty-sequences in this movie and the idea of a halfbreed dude tagging along with the 47 Ronin isn't bad in and of itself - hell, there was that random bandit guy that joined up in 13 Assassins just because he thought killing the bad guy sounded fun, and that worked. Toshiro Mifune joined up with the Seven Samurai and he wasn't a samurai and that fucking worked too. So there was nothing inherently bad about the idea of 47 Ronin + Keanu in magical Japan, basically doing the story of 47 Ronin with some additional magical fights and stuff. That would have been a fun and maybe cool adaptation.

Unfortunately, that's not what we got here. For one thing, the people making the film seem to assume that the audience has left their brain at home and feels the need to explain every fucking thing in great and laborious detail, in particular an annoying-as-fuck opening sequence explaining how this is ancient Japan and there's this young supposed-to-be-Keanu kid blah blah blah shut the fuck up narrator, just start the god-damned movie already.

Anyway, the real opening to the movie is there's this hunt where a bunch of samurai are out hunting this six-eyed demon-elk thing. It's arguably the best part of the movie, because it's the absolute closest they get to allowing Keanu to act. I know people argue that Keanu is really part Treant on his mother's side, but he's a good actor when they give a chance (The Matrix still holds up surprisingly well), but in this movie he's not really given a chance to do more than stab things and mumble a few words or stand there saying nothing while other people treat him like shit. Which is supposed to sort of be his thing as a halfbreed in hideously racist ancient Japan, but gets really annoying when this whole movie is billed as a Keanu vehicle but he's really sort of shoe-horned into a plot where at best he should be a strong supporting character.

Which brings me to something else: the Japanese actors in this movie are really good. I mean, we don't get a lot of recognizable talent aside from Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the Shogun, but nobody's bad at it and to Hollywood's credit most of them (aside from the "Portuguese") are ethnically Japanese. The problem though is that, again, there's not a whole fucking lot for most of them to do. The story of the 47 Ronin is a bit hard to squeeze into to something less than a 3 hour movie to begin with, and then if you start throwing in Keanu's character's backstory, sidequests, the wicked witch, and shit like that, the time for speaking roles really goes down.

And, it's worth saying, at some point fairly early on in the movie I think they kinda lost the fucking thread of the plot. I mean, they pick it up in the end - it's really fucking hard to screw up the end of 47 Ronin although they tried really fucking hard - but the set-up should have been a snap too. Lord gets dishonored, commits seppuku, retainers go masterless and seek revenge. It's pretty simple and elegant from a bare-bones perspective.

Except...well, they abandon the original reason for seppuku, mostly so that Keanu's character can have a love interest with a princess, but also so they could showcase the witch more. And, I have to say, Rinko Kikuchi is one of the few people in this movie that seems to be having fun, even if most of her dialogue is terrible and 75% of her appearance in this movie was CGI. But...and this again ties into the whole aggressive mediocrity thing...the film doesn't really go for any sort of proper cinematic samurai battle and that's the whole fucking reason people are going to see the film.

Case in point: there's this big hulking silent armored samurai that's like seven feet tall and in the credits is billed as "Lovecraftian Samurai," and the whole fucking movie you're waiting for this guy to be a badass and maybe do a really suite choreographed fight with Keanu's character. That never happens. The obviously-empty suit of armor is blown up by a convenient and heretofore nonexistent explosive without killing anybody. It's cinematic blueballing is what it is.

Mostly, I think this is a film with a lot of missed potential. It's not that it sucks so much as it could have been better in any of a billion ways. If they'd played up the magical realism angle more, that would have been fine. If they'd played up the bizarre appearance of the Europeans more and how that was screwing with the whole samurai thing that would have been fine. If they'd made Keanu more OR less important to the plot, that would also have improved it! Seriously, if Keanu had just been a supporting character to the 47 Ronin, the movie would have been improved. And if Keanu had been the main guy behind the 47 Ronin, the movie would have been improved. Keanu as halfbreed wandering around the plot of 47 Ronin and sometimes driving the action and sometimes sitting back and watching bizarre meaningless cutscene battles is just fucking lazy or something.

And, I guess it's fair to say this: visually, the film represents a lot of good work by a lot of talented people, but it is bland. It's generic Hollywood FX CGI fantasy scenery and woodwork, just with the Ancient Japan template applied. The workmanship is good, but the visual palette is stale and the symbolism transparent and weak, and that carries through to just about every other aspect of the film. The bad guy in the original 47 Ronin is a fucking corrupt douchenozzle, but he still has a job and a purpose in life. He's not fucking people over just for lulz, he fucked someone over because they didn't bribe him, and after the guy he fucked over died he is scared as shit that the retainers are going to murder him. His whole thing for the rest of the story is basically "try to stay alive." The bad guy in 47 Ronin is made into a generic bad-guy-for-the-sake-of-being-bad with vague notions of ultimate conquest and maybe banging the witch chick. Don't get me wrong, the actor plays him to a T, but this is a villain for an episode of Xena.

I think I'm mostly out of rant-juice at this point. I could argue more about the plot - the stupidest part of the plot is undoubtedly this bizarre counter-ambush that comes out of almost nowhere - but really, it's a lot like everything else in the movie. It's too generic, a lot of the best details of the 47 Ronin were left out and the stuff they crammed in to make Keanu's character relevant isn't up to snuff, and then when they get back to the 47 Ronin storyline again Keanu is a fucking afterthought. It feels lazy, it looks lazy...it's just an aggressively mediocre film.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I went to see it a few days ago while I was visiting my folks back in Texas. I think that I will just post my own response to the movie here, copied from my own blog.

Had a bit of time on my hands so I walked down to the Alamo Drafthouse and saw 47 Ronin. It was... okay.

It really wants to be a sweeping Wuxia epic, and nothing is quite there for it. It tries really hard, but the cinematography and characterization just aren't quite there. There are some impressive pieces. There's a great piece where Oishi goes to free Kai from slavery on an island held by the Dutch that is really neat, but that's mostly because it feels like they snipped that part out of a Pirates of the Carribean movie, and its not particularly long either. Another part that I liked involved Kai and Oishi going into a temple held by Tengu to ask for swords to fight their enemy with. Of course, I was dissappointed when these Tengu are snake men, and not the long-nosed bird people I have previously seen depicted as Tengu in the past.

The characterization is weak. Almost all of the characterization goes to Keanu Reeves' Kai, and Reeves is not a strong enough actor to carry this movie on his own, as is basically asked of him. Kai is half Chinese, half European (English, I think they said), Kai was found as a teenager, living as a wild man in a haunted forest, and brought back to live on Lord Asano's estate. Only Asano and his daughter Mika think he amounts to anything at all, to the point where Oishi is saved from a rampaging beast early in the film and laments that its better to be killed by the beast than saved by a half-breed. He does repent for this later. Asano is well acted, but due to the nature of his role, that doesn't really amount to much. The villain, Lord Kira, is about as two dimensional as they come, a smirking, smug jackass who does what he does for no more than a naked lust for power. He's aided by Mizuki, a shape-shifting witch who is probably a Kitsune though the word is never actually used. She gives an utterly wretched performance, trying to be sensually evil but just comes off erratic and annoying.

Speaking of the witch, this movie is advertised very badly. They want you to think this is going to be a high-fantasy feudal epic, and it's not. Mizuki gets a few impressive effects scenes, Kai and the Tengu have a thing where they can blur themselves into their clothes to move really fast, and there's an appropriately Oriental Adventures-ish monster at the beginning, and that's basically it. Nobody else gets any impressive powers. They even set it up so they could have them; Kai explains that the Tengu swords are magical and that they would do different things depending on who wielded them, but nothing comes of it. The freaky-looking guy who is tattooed up like a skeleton? He's one of the sailors on the Dutch Island, he gets to be intimidating and then shoot at Kai and Oishi, and then they outrun him and escape. I don't think he even dies.

One thing they do manage, is to lay out the setting effectively. They emphasize how important ritual, tradition, and rules are in their society, to explain why they do things the way they do, and why they end the movie the way they do, which could be very strange in a less... rigorous culture like ours.

On the whole, I was pretty disappointed. I give it a C; If it looks interesting to you, and you can catch it for free, go for it. Otherwise, there are plenty of other movies about the 47 Ronin, I have to imagine that at least one is better than this one.

[JonSetanta]

Eh, would you say it's worth using a Regal gift card for? I'm thinking of waiting until DVD/Redbox.

[Ancient History]

I'm not even sure it's worth pirating.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I am actually super fucking offended that they wrote in a new character so a story with an entirely asian cast could have a white lead, and then go on about how the white lead's character is subject to racial discrimination.

[Ancient History]

<scritch> I can't actually fault them for that one. I mean, Japan is pretty fucking racist by all accounts, and has been for quite a while. So the fact that a half-white guy shows up and is treated like a subhuman for most of the film feels kinda accurate. I mean, it's basically treating Keanu as the Magical Negro.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Any 'accuracy' defense is undermined fairly thoroughly by the introduction of forest spirits and witches into a historical fiction. 'Oh, dragons are fine, but we can't leave out racism. RAELIZRM.'

The real-world racism is where actual Asians aren't allowed to headline a very significantly Asian story. And that might be unavoidable given the realities of making a movie in the current culture. But including in that story a theme about how whites are the oppressed minority is grotesque.

[Ancient History]

My entire ass. There's nothing about a fantasy setting which means you can't include racism as a plot element - sometimes, as in Pleasantville it can even be used very effectively. This is fundamentally a samurai-era Japan movie, they just happened to shoehorn some magic in there. That doesn't mean they should choose to ignore everything else.

[DSMatticus]

Japan's racism is definitely also real-world racism. And yeah, it is pretty fucking funny that they shoved a white lead onto the story and then had him be subject to racism, but let's be honest: they didn't do that because they wanted a white lead. They did that because they had Keanu Reeves. Keanu Reeves being Keanu Reeves is far more important than Keanu Reeves being white, and they just followed the whiteness through to an obvious consequence for the easy storytelling. The humor of what they were doing was probably completely lost on them.

[angelfromanotherpin]

My entire ass. There's nothing about a fantasy setting which means you can't include racism as a plot element - sometimes, as in Pleasantville it can even be used very effectively.

Of course you can include racism in a fantasy mileu, many of the foundational fantasy stories are powerfully racist. What you cannot do is introduce fantastic elements and then claim that your choices were restricted by concern for historical accuracy.

I mean, does the prejudice Keanu's character suffers serve the story in any way? Or is it just lazy manpain writing?

This is fundamentally a samurai-era Japan movie, they just happened to shoehorn some magic in there. That doesn't mean they should choose to ignore everything else.

Interestingly, one of the things they seem to have ignored is that the story takes place in the sakoku period. The period where foreigners were forbidden from entering the country. By law. On pain of death. So if you wanted to talk about accuracy, Kai should have been subject to a lot more than scorn.

Japan's racism is definitely also real-world racism.

Sure, but Japanese racism doesn't influence Hollywood casting decisions and keep Asians out of leading roles in Asian stories. I mean, this shit isn't new.

[fectin]

So, to be clear:
1) We should have serious representations of racism, because it's serious business, which we should present seriously, and anything which neglects historical racism is just whitewashing.
2) Stories which show racism against historically underprivileged groups are bad, unless those groups are not currently underprivileged (e.g. rednecks, the Irish).
3) Showing racism against white people is bad because raisins.

Have I got all the rules there?

[angelfromanotherpin]

I have to say that I'm not even sure what fectin is trying to say, but it seems like a response to me, so I'm going to engage it like it was.

The rule I advocate is this: If you are altering a story to privilege a particular racial perspective, also making that story about how that race is the victim of racism is incredibly tasteless.


Now, showing racism against white people is kind of a questionable decision in today's society. Because in the U.S., there is a real undercurrent of belief that whites are the victims of racial discrimination. And that's not just something you can plainly see from paying attention to the Tea Party noise machine, there have been actual studies. It's a counterfactual and destructive narrative, and pandering to it puts you in the company of Glenn Beck and his peers.

[name_here]

I will admit that rewriting a traditional Japanese story to have a white lead and then writing in racism against white people is kinda messed up. Japanese racism against foreigners might be a real problem, but the target audience of the film is people in America, i.e. not Japan. So the changes aren't pushing a socially valuable message by having a sympathetic viewpoint character of an underprivileged group be the subject of racism, and the whole thing is sourced from not wanting an Asian actor to have the lead role in an Asian story set in Asia.

Now, I can easily understand that the people making a popcorn flick just wanted to have a popular actor in the lead, and it's hardly their fault a disproportionate number of them are white, but they could have handled it differently. There's the straightforward "screw it" method, where he just plays a Japanese character. Or you could have him play an albino with the aid of some makeup. Or, since this is fantasy Japan, you could dig through the extremely large number of mythological beasties they've got and find one which can plausibly be described as looking like a white guy or failing that pick one of the ones which can shapeshift. Or, you know, make a movie about a Japanese story that actually includes Europeans.

I don't think ignoring historical racism, even if it is against the currently dominant ethnicity, is a good thing, but it's only an issue in the story at all because it was rewritten to have a white main character.

[Prak]

Would we be having this discussion if Keanu had been half-yokai and wore enough sfx makeup that you couldn't see his own real white skin, and his character suffered fantastic racism for being a tengu halfbreed or something?

[fectin]

tengu-trained halfbreed

pick one of the ones which can shapeshift.

Tengu &#22825;&#29399; are mountain and forest goblins with both Shinto and Buddhist attributes. Their supernatural powers include shape-shifting into human or animal forms...

---

The rule I advocate is this: If you are altering a story to privilege a particular racial perspective, also making that story about how that race is the victim of racism is incredibly tasteless.

So, you would also oppose any story with black protagonists that shows racism? That's pretty messed up.

Because in the U.S., there is a real undercurrent of belief that whites are the victims of racial discrimination.

It's true! Even the supreme court isn't immune to this scourge of clear sight (e.g. here or here, though there's a similar case about every other year; the paper you avoided citing opens with a longer list).
Perhaps you meant to argue that white people overestimate the impact of racism? That's a fairly slimy argument, but you could make it. You would need a lot more references than some press release misrepresenting a study, itself with poorly justified conclusions.
(Incidentally, here is a copy of the paper you didn't cite: http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/sommers ... rs2011.pdf)

[FaerieGodfather]

So, you would also oppose any story with black protagonists that shows racism? That's pretty messed up.

If it's a traditional black story about black people, and you modified it to insert a white character who was then subject to black racism? You betcha.

That's what you're missing here. It isn't that the Japanese aren't (or haven't been) pretty damned racist against whites, blacks, and what-the-fuck-ever. It's that the movie studio here did a really racist thing in the first place, and then turned around and portrayed the Japanese people in a Japanese story as being racist against the white male lead they felt compelled to add to the story.

[fectin]

Let's pause there: what "really racist thing," exactly, did the studio do?

[Foxwarrior]

They let a non-Asian play a main character.

[Prak]

Yeah, the people here saying that the studio did something racist are basically claiming "White Washing/Mighty Whitey." While it's something of a case of the latter, I still think it's a bit ridiculous. If you made a movie about the American Revolution in a fantasy Americas setting, and made the main character a black character who saved George Washington's ass, no one would be upset, and no one would call racism (ok, they might call Magical Negro, but it depends on how it's written). And while there's a serious and valuable discussion that can be had on whether "reverse-racism" is a thing, or at least whether it's offensive, the phenomena itself (where if you insert a white guy and people baw, but if you insert a poc no one does) is really fucking dumb.

[Starmaker]

the phenomena itself (where if you insert a white guy and people baw, but if you insert a poc no one does) is really fucking dumb.

1. Yes they do. Off the top of my head, I can recall Heimdall and that chick from Hunger Games, and I don't even watch movies.
2. This.

[Prak]

I think people mostly baw'd about Idris Elba being cast Heimdall because Heimdall is literally supposed to be white like ocean foam (as opposed to white like a caucasoid). I'd forgotten about that. I have no clue what's going on with Hunger Games (doesn't most of the race bawing about HG have to do with Katniss being white washed?)

[Neeeek]

I think people mostly baw'd about Idris Elba being cast Heimdall because Heimdall is literally supposed to be white like ocean foam (as opposed to white like a caucasoid). I'd forgotten about that. I have no clue what's going on with Hunger Games (doesn't most of the race bawing about HG have to do with Katniss being white washed?)

The only race thing I recall from Hunger Games was some idiot teenager tweeting about how Rue being black ruined the movie for her. Rue was explicitly black in the book, mind.

[angelfromanotherpin]

There was some controversy that Katniss, who is described as having 'olive skin' and 'straight black hair' specifically had in her casting listing: 'should be caucasian.' Because those traits could describe someone of basically any ethnicity. So it was less about Katniss being whitewashed, as her ethnicity is AFAIK never fully established; just about the studio denying actresses of color the opportunity to even compete for the role.

[Prak]

Ah, ok. I never read the books, so I have basically no interest in the movies or reason to follow them.

[FaerieGodfather]

I think people mostly baw'd about Idris Elba being cast Heimdall because Heimdall is literally supposed to be white like ocean foam (as opposed to white like a caucasoid).

Given the other liberties Marvel's taken with the gods over the years, and then the further liberties the movie took with the comics, this struck me as a mighty peculiar (and particular) thing to get upset about. It's not as though Heimdall was added to the cast of Thor[/b] because the studio thought the audience couldn't identity with a movie about Norse gods without a black lead, and it's not as though Elba's Heimdall were made the star of a movie supposedly about the original heroes.

Even if he was one of the best things about both movies. Day-umn.