John Ford remade 3 Godfathers, William Wyler remade These Three. I’m sure there are other examples of filmmakers trying again (though I have no idea if those examples were artistic or commercial). The Hidden Blade is, at its core, the same film as The Twilight Samurai. The settings are similar, one of the servants is even the same character, and the core conflicts of the films are the same. At the beginning of the film, I was even thinking about it, before I had seen the similarities–what if someone just made the same thing again and again? Writers occasionally do major revisions to their existing work–I’ve read Flannery O’Connor last story is a rewrite of the first and Alice Munro has frequent recurring details–musicians do different versions of a song over time… so why not filmmakers? Maybe The Hidden Blade is a warning to anyone else who thinks my revision observation is a good idea….
The Hidden Blade is based on short stories by the same author of the short stories Yamada adapted for The Twilight Samurai. At first, I thought it was simply overlap–the films are based on multiple stories, so maybe elements from one ended up in both films. No, it’s a lot more than details, it’s set pieces. Yamada runs through The Hidden Blade, telling most of the story in summary, since he’s already told the story… or at least the most memorable parts of it. The story construction, the drama, of The Hidden Blade isn’t good. The main character is conveniently sympathetic–by virtue of being the protagonist–and the film manipulates the audience along… The actor who plays the lead is excellent, but there’s nothing he can do. Watching The Hidden Blade is watching people pretend to be sleepwalking a scene in a movie. There’s no emotional depth. The film is all surface.
I’m not sure The Twilight Samurai had much besides surface depth, but its surface depth but more at stake for the character. While watching The Hidden Blade, one can count all the actions the protagonist takes to cause trouble later on in the film. There’s a total absence of imagination. The Hidden Blade fails to tell the audience anything they couldn’t have read in a two sentence description. There are no judgments to be made, nothing to be pondered–at best, one could make a list of The Twilight Samurai similarities. At worst, one could let the film waste his or her time.
Leave a Reply