Is ‘Seven Samurai’ the single most influential movie ever made?
Cinema’s finest movies tend to exert the most influence over the art form because any aspiring filmmaker would be foolish not to look towards the greats for inspiration. However, no single movie has ever cast a greater shadow over celluloid than Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which looms as large as ever 70 years on.
It isn’t just the spiritual successors and thinly-veiled remakes, either, even if there’s a lot of them. John Sturges’ classic The Magnificent Seven and its Denzel Washington-fronted remake, Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars, Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon have all repurposed the same basic template for better or worse, and those features couldn’t be more different than each other.
Kurosawa’s fingerprints are all over Star Wars, too, with Seven Samurai just one of the maestro’s works that influenced George Lucas, who then went on to restructure the landscape several times over. If it wasn’t for the men-on-a-mission classic, then there wouldn’t be a galaxy far, far away, and cinema as a whole would look unrecognisable from what it is today.
Quentin Tarantino directly referenced it in Django Unchained, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion Isle of Dogs was an ode to Kurosawa’s filmography that made several explicitly pointed nods to the samurai favourite, and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road wears those influences proudly on its sleeve. Again, three markedly different films covering revisionist westerns, animation, and post-apocalyptic action, but that’s the extent of just how deeply ingrained the movie has become into the cinematic consciousness.
It’s not just the nods, winks, and homages by any stretch, with Seven Samurai‘s grandstanding final act completely upending the notion of what action sequences could be. By deploying multiple cameras, capturing dynamic angles, and utilising intricate choreography, Kurosawa tore up the rulebook to reinvent the art of on-screen action in his own image, and it’s a song sheet everyone has been singing from ever since.
Structurally, it’s an incredibly simple story. A village needs protection; it finds said protectors, who then protect said village against an incoming enemy. It’s A-to-B-to-C at its most elemental, but it’s the execution that elevated Seven Samurai to a level cinema has rarely been able to match in the seven decades since, never mind exceed.
The number of movies to have revolved around the ’rounding up the troops for a climactic showdown’ archetype is monumental, and while Seven Samurai wasn’t the first of its kind to hinge on such a straightforward narrative device, the way Kurosawa framed the inciting incident and let it gradually unfold while simultaneously filling in the gaps in the backstories, motivations, and dynamics of the titular septet has been the benchmark since 1954.
It speaks volumes to the impact and imprint made by Seven Samurai that it ended up inspiring the movies which would themselves go on to inspire the movies being made to this day, and there’s no other work of cinema to have created a trickle-down effect that’s even close to being comparable.
Horror owes a massive debt of gratitude to Nosferatu, the crime story bows at the altar of The Godfather and Goodfellas, sci-fi designs to walk on the hallowed ground of 2001: A Space Odyssey, dystopia remains enthralled by Metropolis, and romance will always be looking over its shoulder at Gone with the Wind and Casablanca.
Each of those titles are fully deserving of being among the most influential ever put together, but there are limits on just how far their influence extends due to certain genre parameters. That’s a sentiment that isn’t applicable to Seven Samurai in the slightest, which exists in a class all of its own.
The entirety of the action genre, one of pop culture’s most indelible monopolies, the advent of fluid staging and swooping camera movements, a bunch of insects heading off on an adventure, a maniacal apocalyptic epic that earned a ‘Best Picture’ nomination, and the movie that helped launch the career of James Cameron are just some of the branches to have emerged from the Seven Samurai tree, and that doesn’t even begin to cover it.
