Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven, we’ll get to that. But first,
ONE: Seven Samurai
Sixty-two years after its release in Japan, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai remains one of the greatest action films of all time. Kurosawa, along with his co-writers Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, understood the nature of a story this size, and this populous. The men created a cast of warriors that worked as an ensemble-playing off each other for the benefit of the whole film-but was built of individuals. The run-time of Seven Samurai (over 200 minutes) as well as the
performances of its leads, made that kind of character-to-action work possible; the slowly developing relationship between the dissembling samurai Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) and the aging leader Kambei (Takashi Shimura) is emblematic of the film as a whole: funny, moving, compassionate, violent, tragic, triumphant. It could only work at three plus hours, and thank goodness they were given the time.
But beyond character and story, Kurosawa understood space and movement and orientation. Of this, he was a true master. Seven Samurai gives about an hour of screen-time to its final action sequence. But Kurosawa has done painstaking work orienting audiences to the village and woods that hold this scene. He also makes the plan for the samurais’ defense of the village meticulously clear.
We always know what’s going on, who is where, and why. Watching Seven Samurai is a treasured experience, and every film fan should devote the time.
TWO: The Magnificent Seven (1960)
It was only six years later, in 1960, that John Sturges remade Seven Samurai into an American western. The Magnificent Seven took the sixteenth century story of it’s Japanese originator, and transported it to the plains of the old West. Sturges turned to Yul Brynner, who plays the Souther gunslinger Chris Adams to anchor his band of heroes-which include Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Charles Bronson. In this iteration of the story, the men are called on to protect a Mexican village that is being raided by thieves, led by the brutal Calvera (Eli Wallach).
The Magnificent Seven is a very good western, though it’s not a great one. Sturges cut the run-time by about 80 minutes from Kurosawa’s original, and in doing so, lost so much of what made Seven Samurai work. When Kambei recruits his fellow ronin, audiences get a chance to meet each man individually we learn the stakes that come with taking the job. The decision matters. In Magnificent Seven, Sturges is more interested in giving his stars a turn in the heat. They do a fine job, each of them. But so much is lost when we lose the consequences of the mens’ lives.
THREE: A Bug’s Life
The next time this story appeared on the big screen was in 1998, and it was full of insects. A Bug’s Life, Pixar’s second feature, remade the samurai story in the world of hardworking ants and unwelcome grasshoppers. Director John Lasseter hews his story closely to the original: this time, a colony of ants is being raided annually by the thieving grasshoppers. While the colony works to store up enough food for both ants and grasshoppers, the mischievous ant Flik (Dave Foley) sets out from the colony to enlist the help of warrior bugs to come back and fight off the grasshoppers and their leader, Hopper (Kevin Spacey).
Flik ends up finding a group of performing circus bugs; he sees them doing their act and confuses them for warriors. But they end up returning to fight for the unprotected ants anyway. A Bug’s Life is the absurdist version of Seven Samurai. The film plays for comedy; Lasseter sees the humor and performative nature in his forerunners: a band of miscreant heroes joining up to act like team, then becoming a real team. It’s a perfect story for a bug circus. A Bug’s Life works on a scene-by-scene basis, and Lasseter’s dedication to Kurosawa is admirable. But at the end of the day, not one of Pixar’s best efforts.
Four: The Magnificent Seven (2016) Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven should not exist. I realized this about forty-five minutes in. It’s a remake of an adaptation that was already a step down from the original. Nothing can happen in this film that is not fully telegraphed by the screenplay, the acting, even the audience. There is simply nowhere left to go.
Don’t mistake me. This third remake is just fine. If Fuqua does anything right, it’s his decision to turn his back on the spirit of the original, the layered richness of Kurosawa’s epic-length dramatic action story, and instead pursue genre-cooked familiarity. The Magnificent Seven in Fuqua’s hands is sleek and direct and violent. It looks great (though I could’ve used a dozen or so fewer sweeping crane shots), sounds full, and, if it had even an ounce of originality, just might pull it all together.
But alas.
The Magnificent Seven, fortunately, carries the inherent benefit of starring Denzel Washington as the leader of the do-gooding band of wild men. Washington plays the law-man and warrant collector Sam Chisholm with the kind of internalized anger that only Denzel can muster. Unfortunately, he is surrounded by a slew of talented actors with very little to do. Chris Pratt appears too often, delivering one too many anachronistic jokes for the audience; while Ethan Hawke plays a role so banal that Fuqua would have been wise to simply cut the part and rename the film.
Opposite Denzel is Peter Sarsgaard, who plays the wealthy gold-mining robber baron Bartholomew Bogue. The capitalist Bogue is a mean old monster, and Sarsgaard delights in the villainy and chaos of the part. Bogue gets to stand in front of the townspeople he is terrorizing and deliver modern critiques that ring like church bells in the ears of audiences. Here’s a good one: “This country has long equated democracy with capitalism, and capitalism with God. You are standing in the way of God.”
Sarsgaard does terrific work here, as usual; he is every bit up to the challenge of facing off against Denzel. But all the effort is lost in the lack of drama. Fuqua holds to the form too tightly. Instead of building a powerful, perhaps excoriating critique of capitalism run amok, Fuqua takes us exactly where we already knew we were going.
Sam Chisholm and Bartholomew Bogue deserved their own story. Instead, they got stuck in a competent, but wholly unnecessary bastardization of one of the greatest cinematic stories ever told.
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