Yojimbo

It's always good to go back to the source.

You know, it's funny. Yojimbo was the brainchild of Kurosawa who loved western cinema and wanted to bring it full front to Japan and was inspired by the Western genre, which led the world to appreciate his cinema leading to a Western remake of his Samurai film. We all come full circle some point in life. So how is Yojimbo? Well truthfully if you've seen A Fistful Of Dollars, you've seen Yojimbo. It's almost point for point the same film not just in terms of plot, but characters, scenes, and even certain shots. But I greatly enjoy Fistful Of Dollars, and to see it with samurai instead of cowboys is a really cool idea. I look at it almost as an Elseworlds story, they really should do more stuff like that where you take a popular concept and put a unique twist to it. Like if Star Wars was not a space opera but a Shakespearean drama, or if The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly was told in modern times or hell how about a Scream-esque idea but set in the 1940s. You can find cool and interesting ideas like that. So seeing Yojimbo though heavily familiar, was still really good and kept my attention the whole time. So if you want to know story just read my Fistful Of Dollars review and swap the word cowboy with samurai, it's a good story and though our main character is sort of enigmatic to the point where we have no idea what his name even is, you can tell a lot. This is one of, if not the only Kurosawa film that has a sequel so it greatly intrigues me to see what this ronin samurai will see next, it gives both films this sense of an actual world and it's not just a single adventure with this guy but he's a real person and continues on after the events have played out. So just to be able to see what he gets into next is really fascinating to me, I wish a tv series could do something like that. Take like a Sherlock run time, make it about 6 episodes, and just follow this character whether they be samurai or not and kinda do this movie for the first episode. You run into them, no idea who they are or where they come from, and just sort of follow their lives which will have some major and minor moments that shape their character. Even to the point where we don't care where they came from but we are interested in where they are going. That could be an incredible show and really be something no one has seen before. So I am thrilled to see what happens next in the sequel, Sanjuro.