Official Synopsis
After a treacherous warlord kills their master and banishes their kind, 47 leaderless samurai vow to seek vengeance and reclaim their honor. Transformed into a thrilling, visually stunning 3D film by director Carl Rinsch, 47 Ronin tells the story of a small group of warriors, or ronin, on a quest to avenge the death of their master. Battling across a savage world of mythical beasts, shape-shifting witches and wondrous terrors, the ronin must seek help from Kai (Reeves), an enslaved half-breed they once rejected – in their ultimate fight for redemption.
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The importance of a movie starting out on the right foot can not be overstated. 47 Ronin starts off on the wrong foot, as we’re introduced quickly to Kai (Keanu Reeves) who is a half-breed that has escaped from terrible evil. We’re not given much of a clear backstory on Kai, which is fine, other than he is adopted into Lord Asano’s (Min Tanaka) faction of folk. Around Kai is prejudice, which is evident in the first real fight against evil that Kai is involved with to help save Asano’s men in which he is given no credit because he is not fully Japanese (or a samurai). His outcasting is repeated over and over throughout the film, including with his true love, Mika, who is the daughter of Lord Asano (Ko Shibasaki) and whom he can never be with because of what he is in the scheme of things.
Then the movie shifts away from Kai, quickly goes into some sort of short explanation about a tournament where several visiting villages/cities compete and then confusion starts to run rampant through the story.
We are never given a full explanation about why the competition happens between the factions. We never get a full explanation of what evil lies within Lord Kira’s (Tadanobu Asano) group and what his true motives are in the scheme of the story. Instead of going into all of these things and giving a healthy amount of time to develop the set up at the beginning, the story just glides over all of the details not minding about which one it skips and jumps into the action. A healthy screenwriter certainly doesn’t over-explain things, but under-explaining story can be just as bad; and this story is very under-explained.
Anyway, an incident happens at the competition that places a heavy amount of dishonor on the Asano clan, which leads to Lord Asano’s death via seppuku (honorable suicide of sorts). Once the leader is gone, the Samurai under his command are told by Shogun Tsunayoshi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who is the grand leader over everyone, that they cannot take revenge for their master’s death – also, they’ve been dishonored and must leave. Then things start to slow down a bit and the movie finds pacing and powerful storytelling.
From this point on Ôishi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the leader of the Asano samurai, decides to go against Tsunayoshi and take revenge on their fallen master. Thus, we have 47 Ronin gathered up to go take on the bad guy, even though it is going to mean certain death. Again, this is where the film really starts to slow it down and put it together. We have Kai and crew gathered from various places and then action commences. Lots and lots of good action.
What’s truly tragic about this film is that the action is so good that if the story had been taken care of as equally as good (maybe even halfway as good) then this would have been a really good film. Sadly, it all goes back to the set up, as it’s just completely weak and confusing. Director Carl Rinsch and writers Chris Morgan, Hossein Amini and Walter Hamada needed to understand that most movie goers needed a bit more time to grasp the Japanese culture presented before them and provide a few more details about how things were going to be at the beginning. Because of the complete lack of details, everything just simply looks and feels shallow. I can see how people were a bit dissatisfied with the final result of the film. It’s as if the filmmakers just wanted to get to the action and the story be damned. I enjoy action in films, I love The Expendables because it’s simply dumb fun, but this is not The Expendables. This is supposed to be a beautiful story that builds into this grandiose series of action sequences, but it never comes to fruition. We just get action and no substance. It’s completely a missed opportunity that could have been rectified with 10-15 minutes of script.
Anyway, I won’t ruin the rest of the movie, but rest assure of two things:
1. The story is shallow and empty on healthy details.
2. The action is damn good.
If you like to see a lot of beautiful sword swinging then you’re in luck. if you’re looking for a movie that brings the entire package then you’re going to be disappointed with it. 47 Ronin could have been a fantastic revenge film with plenty of motivation for that action, but it simply doesn’t meet those expectations.
Shifting to something a bit more pleasant, the Digital HD look of this is pretty darn outstanding. Every bit as visually appealing as the Blu-ray counterpart, 47 Ronin has a lot of colors that shine right through in HD (lots of gorgeous blues, yellows, reds and whites/blacks). I was particularly impressed with the clarity of the HD content, as there was little graininess or artifacts to be seen in the picture. There was zero color banding or compression issues. The file size is about 3.5 gigabytes, which isn’t huge at all. It took about 20 minutes to download via iTunes, so you won’t be waiting long for the entertainment.
The audio was darn good as well, so you do get the full package in regards to those categories.
