this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
642 points (94.3% liked)

Leftism

2090 readers
1619 users here now

Our goal is to be the one stop shop for leftism here at lemmy.world! We welcome anyone with beliefs ranging from SocDemocracy to Anarchism to post, discuss, and interact with our community. We are a democratic community, and as such, welcome metaposts that seek to amend the rules through consensus. Post articles, videos, questions, analysis and more. As long as it's leftist, it's welcome here!

Rules:

Posting Expectations:

Sister Communities:

!abolition@slrpnk.net !antiwork@lemmy.world !antitrumpalliance@lemmy.world !breadtube@lemmy.world !climate@slrpnk.net !fuckcars@lemmy.world !iwwunion@lemmy.ml !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com !leftymusic@lemmy.world !privacy@lemmy.world !socialistra@midwest.social !solarpunk@slrpnk.net Solarpunk memes !therightcantmeme@midwest.social !thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world !vuvuzelaiphone@lemmy.world !workingclasscalendar@lemmy.world !workreform@lemmy.world

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Tom Cruise did the whole white savior thing in The Last Samurai.

Did you actually watch the movie?

Spoilers: The Samurai all die in the end. White guy does NOT save the Samurai. In fact the he is the one saved by the Samurai, in a mental health kind of way.

It's not at all a white savior movie. Tom Cruise is more of an audience surrogate character. When they explain Japanese culture to Tom Cruise, the audience also learns about Japanese culture. It wouldn't make any sense for Japanese people to be explaining Japanese culture to each other so there needs to be an outsider in the story for it to work.

You should watch the movie instead of judging it from the movie poster. It really pays a lot of respect to Japanese culture and portrays a sense of loss that happened in the rush to modernize during the Meiji era.

It was also a huge boost to Ken Watanabe's career. He was actually the star of the movie, just that he was an unknown in the west at the time. So they put Tom Cruise on the poster to bring in an audience, but it's really Ken Watanabe's movie. You're missing out if you can't get over the movie poster.

[–] tomkatt@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I've seen the movie multiple times. Despite my comment, it's a decent enough movie. But the entire situation that led to Cruise's character not dying initially (where he's taken prisoner instead of executed) was kind of absurd, and then for him to actually be allowed to meet with the emperor at the end, after essentially engaging in a rebellion and convincing Katsumoto of the same instead of committing sepukku (and then him doing it anyway???)... The whole thing would have been considered shameful, and just stretches belief generally. And Algren (Cruise) was basically the pivot point for the whole thing.

When I refer to the "white savior" thing, he didn't save an individual, he saved "Japan's honor." It's kind of bad in that regard.

Oh, and he wins the heart of the widow who's husband he killed in that first battle. Woo.