10 Ways Akira Kurosawa Has Influenced Modern Blockbusters
10 Ways Akira Kurosawa Has Influenced Modern Blockbusters
Many of Hollywood’s top directors cite the legendary Akira Kurosawa as inspiration. His influence is seen in tons of popular movies, like Star Wars.
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When it comes to naming the greatest filmmaker of all time, a lot of usual suspects are bound to come up – Fellini, Godard, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Bergman, Welles, Truffaut, etc. – but one director that certainly warrants a mention in such a discussion is Akira Kurosawa. Just about every director in Hollywood counts Kurosawa as one of their formative influences.
The ground broken by Kurosawa continues to influence cinema to this day. Kurosawa’s detractors claim that he pandered to western audiences, but the result of this is that he was widely revered in the west and his influence on Hollywood blockbusters is clear as day.
10 Inspiring Star Wars
The most obvious influence that Kurosawa has had on modern blockbusters is George Lucas’ creation of Star Wars. Lucas was primarily inspired by the old Flash Gordon serials, but Kurosawa influenced the saga’s samurai elements.
The original 1977 Star Wars movie has been read as a soft remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, while the ensuing sequels and spin-offs are rife with Kurosawa references.
9 Recontextualizing Shakespeare
While Akira Kurosawa was mostly influenced by American films by directors like John Ford, he took influence from outside of cinema, too. One of his favorite storytellers was William Shakespeare. He adapted three Shakespeare plays for the screen and, in each case, recontextualized the story and characters to a new setting.
Recontextualizing Shakespeare has since become common in Hollywood cinema: The Lion King brought the story of Hamlet to the plains of Africa, 10 Things I Hate About You brought the story of The Taming of the Shrew to an American high school, and Gnomeo & Juliet brought the story of Romeo and Juliet to a garden.
8 The Yojimbo Protagonist
One of Kurosawa’s most heavily remade movies — often without credit — is Yojimbo. Sergio Leone and Corbucci both turned Yojimbo into spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars and Django, respectively), while Bruce Willis starred in Last Man Standing, one of the few official remakes.
Sanjuro, the lone wolf protagonist of Yojimbo, has influenced a ton of subsequent blockbuster antiheroes: the Man with No Name, Snake Plissken, John Wick, the Mandalorian, etc.
7 Opening Action Scene
Most action movies will open with a scene in which the audience gets to see the hero in action in a scenario unrelated to the rest of the plot. It’s sort of a variation on Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat!” moment.
This trend is widely regarded to have originated with Seven Samurai, whose opening action scene sees Kambei posing as a monk to save a boy from a kidnapper.
6 Cutting On Motion
Kurosawa’s tendency to cut from one shot to another on the motion of an actor to hide the cut and avoid calling attention to it has been noted by many critics. For example, when Shichirōji kneels down to comfort Manzo in Seven Samurai, Kurosawa cuts on the action of kneeling.
Cutting on motion has become the norm for Hollywood blockbusters, whose cut rate has steadily increased as the audience’s attention span has faded, especially in fight scenes.
5 Violence
Kurosawa’s films have been lauded for their thematic exploration of cycles of violence, particularly in the sons’ lust for power in Ran and in Macbeth’s recontextualized story in Throne of Blood.
Since Kurosawa’s samurai classics led to the modern blockbuster landscape, it’s hard to find success at the movies without violence these days. Like Kurosawa’s warriors, Hollywood’s superheroes and Jedi Knights are violent badasses. Even Titanic had a gun-toting maniac in the finale.
4 Mentors & Mentees
A lot of Kurosawa’s movies revolve around mentor-mentee relationships: Sanshiro Sugata, Stray Dog, Red Beard, Seven Samurai, Drunken Angel, Dersu Uzala — the list goes on. Now, mentors are common in Hollywood blockbusters, from Django Unchained to Kingsman to Forrest Gump. In almost every MCU movie, the hero has a mentor who dies to motivate them to save the day.
Hollywood’s obsession with mentors can mostly be accredited to Obi-Wan’s role as Luke’s mentor in Star Wars more than any specific Kurosawa film, but Star Wars was inspired by Kurosawa, so that goes back to him, too.
3 Rain
Ever since Kurosawa’s breathtaking rainy action scenes in Seven Samurai blew audiences away, rain has been frequently used to create a powerful atmosphere ahead of an action sequence.
Rain was used to build tension in the Battle of Helm’s Deep sequence in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Neo and Agent Smith’s climactic fight in The Matrix Revolutions, and the big finale in Blade Runner.
2 Big Battle Sequences
Filmmakers have been shooting big battle sequences since the invention of moving images, but Akira Kurosawa’s deft command of action, suspense, and clarity of movement made his battles the best.
The influence of battle sequences from movies like Ran and Seven Samurai can be seen in the large-scale battle sequences that bookend all the Marvel movies.
1 The Seven Samurai Formula
In Seven Samurai, one of Kurosawa’s greatest works, a village is threatened by a gang of bandits, so a makeshift team is assembled to defend the townspeople from their attack. The best-known remake of Seven Samurai is, of course, The Magnificent Seven, which brings its story to the Old West.
But the Seven Samurai formula has been emulated by a ton of blockbusters, including Saving Private Ryan, The Expendables, The 13th Warrior, and Battle Beyond the Stars, as well as episodes of The Mandalorian, The Walking Dead, and The A-Team.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/akira-kurosawa-huge-influence-major-hollywood-blockbusters-star-wars/
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