Shogun: An Englishman washes ashore on Japan and discovers the Japanese warrior culture.
I REVIEWED all of Kurosawa’s projects, so it’s no secret that I like Japanese historical culture, language (it just sounds so killer) and cinema. With Shogun featuring strong atmosphere and strong acting performances, I think this show was intriguing, but its glacial pacing was very hard to get through. The good parts are good, but given the amount of politicking that you have to navigate to get there, it’s a tedious venture.
I love the main Japanese star, actor Hiroyuki Sanada:
…who, aside from Ken Wantanabe (not in the show), is one of the few bad ass, well known Japanese-heritage actors getting a lot of work in Western projects today. They both have such screen presence, and remind me constantly of older Kurosawa heroes. Wantanabe especially is like Toshiro Mifune, as he’s wilder, but he’s not in the show so we gotta save him for another day.
Hopefully this doesn’t read as racially insensitive, but I also found it difficult to keep track of the Japanese actors (besides Sanada, who I knew beforehand). Their uniforms, hairstyles and personalities didn’t allow for very many to stick out, and also, it was hard to remember which lord was working for who / betrayed who / who wanted what / etc. Its kinda hard to keep track of everyone and their factions, so you just have to roll with it. Some plot lines I forgot about completely. Someone would pop up and I’d think, “shit, who was this dude? What did he want? How does this affect things overall?” and I’d come up short. Maybe I should have paid more attention, but to me this comes across as a failure of the show.
A good portion of the show follows the “Anjin”, Englishman John Blackthorne, who washes onto Japanese shores and is befuddled by the warriors he finds. He’s played by Cosmo Jarvis, who is a wonderfully lively British actor that I wasn’t familiar with.
He’s very respectful toward the bushido culture, who give him that same respect back, but gets in a decent amount of trouble. His interactions with the translator Mariko, and their relationship - such as how she chooses to translate his gruff grunting - is the best point of the show by far.
I actually think that the showrunners probably should have focused on this more and omitted more of the palace intrigue and maneuvering. It’s very easy to follow Blackthorne/Mariko and not very easy to follow the other storyline.
The title sequence is freaking awesome. Let’s hear it for cool title sequences! Good ones are incredible and bad ones are so dull. Nothing like a good title sequence to get you fired up for a show…though these credits usually had more action than the episode itself.
I’m a big fan of camerawork with the Japanese landscapes, except that it was filmed in British Columbia, Canada. Kind of a bummer, but who knew that Canada was a good stand-in for Japan? With the cinematography, I also noticed that in general, there were a lot of shots with a very shallow depth of field. This basically means that there is a narrow plane that doesn’t have a lot of things in focus. I have seen this as a trend more and more often and don’t quite know what to make of it. The overall look is very distinctive but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Redditor Tobarson pointed this out using this shot:
The dudes to the left are probably only five feet from the dudes on the right. How come they’re out of focus? Most of the time, cinematographers would use a lens that would include everyone in the same depth of field. I don’t get it. Very distinctive, but it doesn’t add anything to what the scene is trying to convey. Why fade out people in the scene?
Lastly: There are some big chewy scenes, but they’re sooooo talky. It’s almost as if you have to take notes to keep up. I found that you really had to pay attention with this show, and maybe I didn’t give it the respect it deserved, but there needed to be more gravitas with it. You feel a build at some points, and there are scenes with the Anjin training cannon crews which get tested and there’s a small attack, and lots of super intense seppukus, but there isn’t really a giant battle that we’re all expecting. In fact there isn’t much payoff at all. I was let down by this promise that never materialized.
I would recommend this show if you’re skimming it (though maybe that was why I didn’t like it?) or if you have a lot more patience than I do - very cool things going on and very pretty to look at, but toward the end it feels pretty empty.
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Blue Eye Samurai: “A sword from this steel could kill a god.”
This is one of the funnest Netflix projects I’ve seen in years, featuring Tarantino-esque levels of people getting diced. Blue Eye Samurai has a super interesting animation style, kind of like how Berserk was - a combination of computer + hand drawn animation. Overall this show is pretty simple: gotta get some good old fashioned REVENGE.
They even have a direct reference to Kill Bill with the “Battle Without Honor Or Humanity” (this song) in the training montage!
This is very R-rated, and in some episodes, close to X-rated. Netflix still loves going for weird cringey stuff like a woman wearing a mask with a long nose, pegging a dude. They push further and further with every project. It’s just kind of funny now, especially with the animation, but it gets cringey fast as it’s very unneeded. However, most of the hard rating comes from the fights, ALL of which are just so bad ass. Here are two - if you like them, check out the show, no more questions asked.
Come on man. Incredible. Mizu knows how to trash the trash in her way, and it never gets old to watch her pulverize people. The battles are wildly creative, and as a sidenote, it’s nice to see Mizu get hurt once in a while. I’m never a fan of a protagonist who can just walk through opponents with no problems. I realized the tone of this show overall when Mizu crashes a dude’s face, knocking his teeth out, and then she flings the teeth into another dude’s eye. HOLY CRAP.
Sucks to be this guy:
Most of the nudity is pretty gratuitous, but there is an excellent scene where Mizu is creating a new sword and covers herself in tattoos in the process. It’s a cool, primal scene where she’s naked, the tattoos are flashing, and the show doesn’t try to cover her up, and ends up being tasteful and cool.
There’s also scenes where it is plot-motivated: in the first episode, I was certain that the protagonist was a woman. She was drawn like a woman and moved like one, and I doublechecked to see that she had a female voice actress. But I was puzzled why the show wasn’t explicitly confirming this to us. Then, at the end of Episode 1, another character catches her naked in a hot spring. I found this a smart, tasteful use of some R rated content, in a way that the show is very splashy with in later episodes. Cmon Netflix. Use your head and make the R-rated content work, dont get so gratuitous with it. On the other hand, a favorite podcaster of mine, Kirk Hamilton, said that this show has “the most amount of flopping penises” that he could recall. He’s probably right about that.
I was pretty put off by the plot line with the princess and the prince guy, Taigen. Both of those characters were, as Mizu stated, “fucking brats”, and their scenes were not really that fun to follow. The dude was kind of cool, because though Mizu bests Taigen in a duel and he swears revenge, he works with her in her quest to find the father that abandoned her. Both Akemi and Taigen are so wildly self-centered that it’s hard to care about them.
Even before we start watching, we’re aware of the race factor due to the title: Mizu is looked down upon by others because she is half-white, half-Japanese. The show has great script writing that reflect this, like when a swordmaker reflects on the impurity of swords being an advantage that matches Mizu’s blue eyes. As a child she was consistently ridiculed for this trait by the other Japanese children who saw themselves as more racially pure. I’m not saying I’m glad to see racism in shows, but Japanese racial superiority was definitely a thing for centuries. So it’s notable that the show embraces part of this (gross) aspect of the society for the time, and doesn’t stick to the Leftist tenet that only white people have ever been racist.
As for how this relates to what Mizu wants: she claims she wants revenge, but…why? For what? Against who? We know she’s out to find her white father, but why? The show is never explicit about this. She hates Abijah Fowler (voice by the famed Kenneth Branagh) and he is definitely a major asshole, but he never did anything personally to Mizu. After some deeper thinking about this, it appears as though she is chasing down her father for revenge…for creating her as mixed-race. Dark and weird and some self-loathing going on. She hates them for giving her life, because that life has been such an uphill fight as her blue eyes give her heritage away as “not full Japanese”. Even her sword trainer advises her not to set out for revenge, but she can’t help it.
There are lots of moments that are super cinematic, like listening to swords sing when drawn from a sheath, Mizu putting a candle out with a sword swipe then carving up the smoke, and many more. Just stuff that makes you go “yeah man”. I found this a bloody, refreshing, hip show. The murderyness is fun, but it’s a very strongly written group of characters and story. Sadly it looks like Season 2 is delayed until 2026(!), but this is a roaring good time on its own.