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Ran (1985)

★★★★★ — Ran (1985)

Akira Kurosawa had spent years struggling to get Ran made, with the project gestating through much of the 1970s while he faced a period of serious professional and personal difficulty, including a near-fatal suicide attempt in 1971. French producer Serge Silberman (who had backed Luis Buñuel's later work) ultimately provided the financing that Japanese studios were reluctant to supply, resulting in a French co-production with a budget of twelve million dollars, making it the most expensive Japanese film ever produced at the time. The film transposes Shakespeare's King Lear into the world of warring feudal lords, with Kurosawa drawing also on the historical figure of Mōri Motonari. Shot largely on location around Mount Fuji and the ruins of Himeji Castle, it starred Tatsuya Nakadai, a Kurosawa regular since the early 1960s, in the central role of the ageing warlord Hidetora. Kurosawa was 75 during production and had been planning and painting storyboards for the film for over a decade.

A-Z World Movie Tour Japan Ran is not a film, it’s an earthquake disguised as cinema and the culmination of a genius directors' lifes work. A thunderstorm of colour, chaos, and human folly so vast it feels like it was carved into the earth itself. Watching it, I kept thinking "how on Earth did one man orchestrate this?" Kurosawa didn’t just make a movie; he summoned an entire world, dragged it through fire, and left us with something that feels ancient, eternal, and unbearably tragic. The scale is staggering. We’re not talking CGI armies or digital extras, we’re talking real people, hundreds of them, clashing in wide shots across mountaintops and valleys in battles so immersive you can almost smell the blood and sweat. The siege of Castle Izu is a masterpiece of choreography and carnage, shot with such clarity and fury it makes modern action scenes look timid by comparison. This is filmmaking on an operatic scale, the kind of spectacle we’ll likely never see again in an era of green screens and motion capture. This film existing is why I find it so hard to give modern spectacles like Marvel Endgame a high score. It doesn't "feel" real like this does. At its heart, Ran is retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear. A tale of pride, betrayal, and the slow, agonizing collapse of a man who thinks he can control fate. Hidetora, the aging warlord played with haunting gravitas by Tatsuya Nakadai, is Lear reimagined in samurai armour. His descent into madness isn’t just moving, it’s inevitable. You watch him unravel like a scroll being pulled apart by time itself. And then there’s the visual poetry. The crimson banners against ash-grey skies. The lone figure walking through a skeletal tree grove like Death himself. The use of colour (Red, blue, yellow) not just for beauty but for meaning. Every frame is painted with purpose. It was also thankfully so easy to tell who was fighting who. Takemitsu’s score is equally immortal, haunting, sparse, and swelling at just the right moments to break your heart all over again. It doesn’t just accompany the film; it breathes with it. Is it Kurosawa’s greatest? For me, Seven Samurai and High and Low still sit a hair higher, purely because they’re tighter, meaner, more relentless. But Ran is his swan song wrapped in fire, the final roar of a titan who still had more to say than most directors ever do.

Rating: ★★★★★ | Year: 1985 | Watched: 2025-07-06

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