This movie is great. That's the first thing I want to say about this movie.
I was scrolling through HBO Max looking for the movie that I wanted to watch and I kept seeing samurai movies. I've always been interested in samurai movies and I had scrolled past some already and I said to myself that the next one I see while scrolling I'll watch. This happened to be it and it looked good, so now I'm here. There are two other movies, which I'll probably get to either this week or as my next few assignment blogs. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. At first I wasn't to sure because the movie started very fast, but I was quickly enveloped in the movie and the story. The story follows Takezo (Musashi), a samurai, and his original quest for fame. This quickly changes when his friend gets injured during the battle and they hide as dead bodies to avoid being killed themselves. I don't want to spoil to much more of the story, but the movie jams a lot of story into an 1 hour and 30 minute long movie. The surprising thing is that the movie moves fast and does have a fast pacing, but it doesn't feel unnatural. I think if that this movie was made today it would probably be somewhere around 2 hours, which I would not be against. I will say that the movie is not perfect, but the biggest negatives I have about the movie are outshined by the good things that I noticed. The only big negative I had was the choreography for the fights, but I will give the movie some credit because it is from 1954 and they didn't have things that we have today that could make the fights more realistic. The only other thing I would knock on the movie is the acting. Another thing I would give to the age of the movie, but I would say that the acting is only barely average. So not unbearable to watch, but a thing I did notice at first. Again these things didn't bother me as much as I watched more of the movie. The first positive I will talk about is the cinematography. Oh my God is the cinematography beautiful. I was watching on my phone and tried to take some screenshots of shots that I thought were amazing, but they didn't work. I don't know where this movie was filmed, but it is seriously a beautiful movie. It's not super complicated shots, but the location played a big part in the effectiveness in the shots that did really stand out to me. Every building is so pretty and amazingly designed and whenever characters were in the forest or in the towns, I was blown away by the location. The next couple of things that I want to talk about relate to the cinematography a little, but the next one is the set design. At the beginning of the movie Takezo is in a battle and we see the two armies collide and because we just watched Birth of a Nation I was paying attention to this and was very surprised at the size of this battle. It wasn't Birth of a Nation Civil War battle big, but it was very big and there were so many people and not one person looked out of place. There are also some other scenes with a large amount of people in them that I noticed, but this battle was the one that really kind of got my attention. The next thing that I noticed was the editing. I wouldn't say I often pay attention or notice a films editing, but I am glad that I did notice the editing of this movie because I thought that it was great. The movie has some cuts where I didn't even realize that it was a match cut until I notice the character moving showing time passed and that it is a new shot. The film is a very well made movie and I would give a lot of credit to how the camera works in this movie because it elevates the movie to great status. That's about all I have to say now, but I want to watch the other two movies and make blogs about them without them counting as my weekly blog. Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto gets an 8.5/10 from me.
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