Genre Action

Ran (1985)

★★★★★ — Ran (1985)

There are films that arrive with the weight of decades behind them, and Ran (1985) is one of those rare cases where the weight feels entirely earned. Akira Kurosawa's epic transposition of Shakespeare's King Lear to sixteenth-century feudal Japan tells the story of Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging warlord who divides his domain among his three sons, only to watch that decision pull everything he has built apart at the seams. It is a film about power, hubris, and the particular cruelty of consequences arriving exactly when you least have the strength to face them. That the story still lands with such force four centuries after Shakespeare first wrote it is, of course, partly the point.

By the time Ran went into production, Kurosawa was in his mid-seventies and had spent years struggling to get the project financed in Japan. French producer Serge Silberman eventually came aboard alongside the Japanese studios, and the resulting co-production between Nippon Herald Films, Herald Ace, and Greenwich Film Production gave Kurosawa the resources to realise the film on a genuinely enormous scale. It would prove to be one of the most expensive Japanese productions ever mounted at the time. Kurosawa had, of course, already demonstrated his facility with Shakespeare in the earlier Throne of Blood (1957), his celebrated reworking of Macbeth, but Ran is a altogether more expansive undertaking, with real armies of costumed extras, purpose-built sets, and location work across several of Japan's most dramatically varied landscapes. The production took years of preparation, with Kurosawa reportedly spending a decade developing the project and producing hundreds of detailed storyboard paintings before a single frame was shot.

At the centre of it all is Tatsuya Nakadai as Hidetora, a performer who had worked extensively in Japanese cinema over the preceding decades (fans of his earlier work might know him from Harakiri (1962) and Yojimbo (1961)). Here he is working in a register that demands something beyond ordinary dramatic range, playing a man whose authority is absolute right up until the moment it evaporates entirely. Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, and Daisuke Ryū take the roles of the three sons, each given a distinct visual identity through costume and colour, while Mieko Harada delivers a performance as the coldly scheming Lady Kaede that lingers long after the credits roll. The cast is uniformly committed to material that asks them to operate at something close to full pitch for the better part of 160 minutes, and it is a testament to Kurosawa's control that it never tips into incoherence. The film had its share of international attention on release and has since settled firmly into the canon of world cinema as one of the major works of the decade, polished but never bloodless, grand but never hollow.

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.

Coming back to Ran for this entry in the A-Z World Movie Tour has only reinforced what I suspected going in: this is the kind of film that demands to be seen on the biggest screen you can find, ideally more than once. The comparison to High and Low (1963) feels right to me, because that film has a similar quality of total command, of a director who knows exactly where every piece needs to be at every moment. Where Ran differs is in its sheer scale of grief, the sense that we are watching something irretrievable being lost in real time. I find it hard to walk away from it feeling anything other than quietly stunned. Some films remind you why cinema exists. This is one of them.

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

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Ran (1985) on YouTube

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