If you enjoy action-oriented period films and you aren't bothered by inaccurate historical accounts, you may enjoy this film. However, if you are interested in this time period and in the modernization of Japan in the later 19th century, then steer clear of this shameless Tom Cruise vehicle.<br /><br />For those who haven't seen it, the movie is set during Japan's modernization and deals with the Emperor Meiji's short war against the samurai who resisted the societal change. Tom Cruise plays a drunken American army officer who is inexplicably charged with training the Emperor's new modern army (why a drunk would be chosen for this, especially an American and not a German as it was in reality, is perplexing). He is captured by the samurai and learns their ways and ultimately fights alongside them.<br /><br />What I found most annoying about this movie was the terrible moral that it left: that it is better to revert to the old ways of society and not ever change. Hollywood filmmakers LOVE tacking this moral onto their corny action epics, and apparently it doesn't bother them that if society never changed, we'd still be in caves right now eating raw deer carcasses.<br /><br />For those truly interested in the history of this movie's time period, please know that Japan's modernization was a good thing and rational. The big struggle to restore the "peaceful tranquility" of the old days was just a bunch of stubborn samurai who didn't want to lose their status in society. Japan was smart to modernize and adopt western practices of war, because if they hadn't they would have probably been conquered and colonized by the more technologically advanced western countries of the time. The movie's big message is essentially that change of any kind is bad and we should never advance as a culture. Which, coming from the minds of Hollywood screenwriters who would all have been subjugated as serfs had they lived during this period and it had not changed, is pretty hypocritical.