Killing

The shaky camera pretty much ruined it. I mean, plotwise it has nothing. Running at only 80 mins with a title like that you expect it to be more focus on the action, less on the drama. They had one job, which is to make the action sequence "awesome." However, the director decided to go with the Blair Witch shaky camera instead. You pretty much can't see anything, what is going on, and it is nauseating.

It's really sad because I heard good things about this film, how a lot of samurai drama films are now heavily based on CGI and this film uses the traditional style. Yet, they managed to ruin it. It is nothing like Twilight Samurai, The Devil's Claw, or When the Last Sword is Drawn.

Utterly waste of time.

I love period pieces it is my favorite genre. Especially from WWI, WWII, Korea, Japan and China. This movie seemed like the perfect fit for my tastes. I was very wrong. I stopped this movie at 57 minutes and refused to watch anymore. I do understand what the director was trying to do on him not wanting to kill. However the execution failed miserably. The movie had beautiful scenery, the costumes and setting were perfect. The camera was terrible for any scenes with extensive movement. It was reminiscent of the zombie movie Rekill where I got vertigo trying to watch it. I personally think the critics got this very wrong. It's why I don't trust critics.

Tzuzuki is a Ronin, a masterless samurai living at the very end of the long period of peace through to the mid 19th Century which made such swordsmen surplus to Japanese society. He seems happy wandering, helping farmers in exchange for food, but trouble is stirring in Edo and he realises he must go there - it is unclear whether out of duty or hope for his own future. He seems to get lucky when a wandering master swordsman asks him to join him on a mission to help the Shogun against his enemies. This seems to set us up for a traditional clash between desire and duty, modernity and tradition, but the film takes a surprising turn when a few tough guy wanderers arrive in the village and Tzuzuki is hit with a fever, meaning he has to stay longer.

The film takes a strange turn when we realise that Tzuzuki is not just reluctant to leave his farmer friends, but is almost pathologically unable to translate his sword skills into the real job of killing men - even deserving men. The fever itself seems to encompass his whole world. Suddenly everything is not what it seems - not the master swordsman, not the sweet village girl who seems to love Tzuzuki, not the tough but seemingly good hearted wanderers.

This is a very modern take on the traditional Samurai genre. Plenty of previous Samurai movies examine the twisted ethos of the warrior class, but few examine so much how killing itself destroys the humanity of the swordsman. It is strikingly filmed and directed - normally I hate shaky-cam films, but its used effectively here to create a hallucinogenic atmosphere of confusion and chaos. The settings are very beautiful and effectively caught by the cinematography and the short running time of the film means that there is no flab at all - its a gripping, tight film, with its only flaw really that we never really get to understand the characters real motivations. Nevertheless, this is definitely one of the best modern samurai films I've seen in some time.

A samurai drama about several people trying and continually failing to leave a small village for about 80 minutes.

It was interesting to see Shinya Tsukamoto's take on the samurai film, but I don't think it worked great overall. I could get used to the digital look of things, but I hated how often it would cut to a close-up from exactly the same angle- it looked cheap and jarring almost every time (they did the same thing less frequently in the new Top Gun, whenever they wanted a close-up of a pilot mid-flight; I hope it's not a thing that's considered acceptable editing nowadays).

Worth it for Tsukamoto completionists of course, and maybe for die hard samurai fans, as it's not awful, but otherwise it's a little hard to recommend.

One samurai says to another, "Tell me, Mr Sawamura, I don't get how you kill so easily. How can you? I want to... I want to be able to kill."

And that's what this film comes down to: one character is young, inexperienced, and grappling with that daunting prospect of a first kill, whereas the other is a lightning-quick master swordsman, blade fused with the mind, not needing to think in the moment of decisions. Their paths will cross, destinies tied, fates already sealed...

Overall, 'Killing' is just a great samurai film, providing us with a small portion of a much larger picture. It's intimate in scope and thematically engaging - an entertaining diversion in a bygone landscape. The handheld camera work is initially off-putting, especially if you're used to the likes of Kurosawa's filmmaking style within the genre, but otherwise there's few complaints to list in this Japanese historical drama.

8/10.