This movie is best know to me, and most movie nerds around my age, as the movie that George Lucas borrowed from for his basic outline of STAR WARS. While this movie does have some of the basic elements, a princess who's kingdom has been destroyed, an evil empire, sword-fights which are sorta like light-saber duels, two bumbling characters which you can see inspired C3PO and R2D2, it's also about as different from Lucas' film as GODZILLA is from JAWS and no one would ever call STAR WARS a remake of this. This movie is also really long which is not something I appreciate in most films but you get some beautiful shots(it was Kurosawa's first film shot in widescreen and he makes amazing use of this with some large scale scenes involving tons of people) and as usual with this director there's an interesting enough group of characters to keep you involved in the story without tuning out. Toshiro Mufune as always plays the bad-ass samurai hero who takes no shit which is great. Overall this one doesn't stand up to, and is even sort of dull, when compared to something like THE SEVEN SAMURAI for all-out samurai action but it's still worth checking out if you dig the Japanese classics that Hollywood rummaged through to get ideas for years to come.
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