‘47 Ronin’ movie: Why so fast?

By Ausama Anwar:

When movies get divided into genres, their scripts will have a varied pace of events: biography and drama movies have a very slow pace of events, while action and sci-fi or thriller movies have a speedy pace. When you portray someone’s life in a biography or drama movie, you can include every detail of it perfectly; but when it comes to an action or thriller movie, you give less emphasis to such events than to special effects and action scenes. We see in novel-based movies that they always ‘hurry through’ the events of the novel, because you can’t include every detail or event: for example, if you try to include all the events from the ‘The Hobbit’ novel, you need more than one movie. However, the ‘speed’ I’ve seen in the recently-released ‘47 Ronin’ is something else.

‘47 Ronin’ is based on a Japanese legendary story. It is directed by Carl Erik Rinsch and, due to its one dimensional movie type, Matrix star (Keanu Reeves) got the main actor role. The posters and trailers of the movie before its release, were suggestive of another good production from Reeves, following on from ‘Man of Tai Chi’. However it wasn’t as good as expected, and this is because of some issues.

47 Ronin movie poster

First of all, the posters and trailers refer to a fictional character in the movie called ‘Outlaw’ or ‘Savage’ and yet we only see him for few seconds in the movie, and he wasn’t holding a gun in the movie, though he does in the poster which creates the impression of a full-on action character who doesn’t exist in the movie. So, to be honest, its first time for me to see a poster that shows more than happens in the movie. I wonder, was the movie’s advertising manager just trying to make more money or displaying a regret for Savage’s tiny role in the movie?

Second point is, the movie was going so faster than it should. I understand that it’s fictional and fantasy genre, but also we should note that it’s based on a story, amd so the movie is story-based as much as it’s fictional and fantasy, but actually the movie’s pace was as fast as an action movie.

I think that’s also the reason that caused the disappearance of the savage’s role. What’s more, when the main actor Kai arrives in Asano’s lands, we see him grow in just in the blink of an eye, despite all those growth and development of skills he acquired.

The movie has earned 42 million dollars so far, but its budget was 175 million Any movie’s script and storyline should be calculated in many ways before its direction and its production, but – seriously – what we see with ’47 Ronin’ is just a ‘wind’ production.

Ausama Anwar was born in 1994, in the capital of the Kurdistan region, Hawler. He is a writer and author of two books published in Kurdish. ‘A Gate to the Intellectual’ is dedicated to youth generally with an intellectual background. ‘Hidden Idea: Some Samples from Movies’ is a work of creative movie analysis. Ausama is also a journalist at ‘Yakgrtw’ newspaper, and leader of a society youth group called ‘Zamwa’.