BINGEWATCH
Each month, our marathon
man straps on to a sofa for
a no-holds-barred bingethis month:
SEVEN SAMURAI
AND ITS REMAKES
WORDS SIMON CROOK ILLUSTRATION PETER STRAINRELEASED IN 1954, Seven Samurai is one of
cinema’s elastic classics: it’s been stretched,
twanged and jerked into countless contortions.
How a movie set in feudal Japan can re-materialise
in space one minute, an ant-hill the next, is down
to its universal three-act blueprint: all the ilms
here feature an under-siege community, a gathering
of heroic misits and a Pyrrhic victory over
impossible odds. So, here we go. Seven versions:
13 hours of the same story, again and again.
Akira Kurosawa’s epic spawned numerous
men-on-a-mission imitators, but its remorseless
mood remains unique. Get this for desolate:
the Seven Samurai aren’t in it for glory; they’re
ighting for food. Add crop-stealing bandits to
a world that hostile, and any heroics hit all the
harder. Paced like an approaching war-drum,
here’s a ilm drenched in jeopardy that peaks
in a hellish Somme of muddy slaughter. Toshiro
Mifune’s arse-lashing, volatile maniac is rightly
celebrated, but the ilm wouldn’t work without
Takashi Shimura’s shrewd, weary ronin. Mifune’s
the movie’s guts. But Shimura’s the heartbeat.
After three-and-a-half hours immersed in
Kurosawa’s bleak, stormy nihilism, John Sturges’
The Magniicent Seven, the irst oficial remake,
coming six years after the original, feels bizarrely
lightweight. Translated to a lawless frontier ofgun-slinging vigilantes, the setting its the story,
but any complexity’s lost to the Western’s simpler
macho code. Yul Brynner’s all-stars sacriice
themselves for the hell of it. Still, you can’t knock
the coolly rugged cast (McQueen! Coburn!
Bronson!) or Elmer Bernstein’s score.
1980 was blessed with two Samurai clones,
both under the spell of Star Wars. Battle Beyond
The Stars swaps swords for spaceships as John
Saxon’s galacto-Nazi threatens to vaporise the
planet Akir. Cue an unholy casserole of alien
warriors, space Vikings and the late Robert Vaughn
rifing on his mercenary from The Magniicent
Seven. It’s vintage cheddar, surprisingly faithful
and throbbing with dodgy innuendo. Also from
1980: Hawk The Slayer. Given they share similar
quest-recruit traits, a dungeons-and-dragons
Samurai makes perfect sense, but the result is
Tolkien staged as pantomime. This time, we get
Mr Slayer enlisting a dwarf, an elf, a witch and a
giant to protect a nunnery from Jack Palance’s
scenery-gobbling mega-bastard. That distant
whirring sound? Kurosawa, spinning in his grave.
The format’s now so familiar it’s crying out
for parody: enter ¡Three Amigos! (1986). In John
Landis’ comedy Western, Steve Martin, Martin
Short and Chevy Chase rescue a village from
Mexican bandits. Or at least, pretend to —they’re actually ilm stars on holiday by mistake.
Not all the gags land, but the casting’s innately
funny: every cowboy cliché gets skewered by
the Amigos’ gormless naivety. Especially notable
for Chase getting upstaged by a singing bush.
Next up: Seven Samurai on six legs. Pixar’s
audacious, underrated A Bug’s Life (1998) shrinks
the story into an ant colony menaced by Kevin
Spacey’s grasshopper. It’s packed with in-jokes
and callbacks to previous incarnations: pill bugs
Tuck and Roll look suspiciously like mini-Mifunes,
all shaggy eyebrows and samurai-armour shells.
Antoine Fuqua’s recent reboot retools the
story as a capitalist allegory — razing a town
for the sake of a gold mine, Peter Sarsgaard’s
robber-baron is the One Percent personiied. The
movie’s USP, however, is its multi-ethnic
mercenaries — Comanche Indian, iery Latino,
Korean knife-thrower, Denzel Washington’s
badass cow-bro... I’m all for diversity, but it’s
used as character shorthand here — there’s no
depth to the Seven, or Fuqua’s direction, who
quotes so many classic Westerns it wanders into
nostalgia tourism. Fuqua’s ilm is a quick-draw
remix: it goes in one eye and out the other.THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN IS OUT NOW
ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD.