Quartile rating: 9/10 · 1 rating
Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.
Ran is one of Kurosawa's supreme achievements — a monumental reimagining of King Lear transplanted into feudal Japan with staggering visual grandeur. The cinematography is arguably the finest of Kurosawa's career: the battle sequences, with their color-coded armies moving across volcanic landscapes, are among the most painterly images ever committed to film. The plot masterfully deepens Shakespeare's tragedy by shifting the daughters to sons and adding Lady Kaede as a ferociously original character. The acting, particularly Tatsuya Nakadai's descent into madness, is towering. Novelty earns a 4 not for radical reinvention but for its singular, utterly unmistakable execution — no other film sounds, looks, or feels like Ran. The ending, while appropriately bleak and visually iconic (the blind Tsurumaru on the fortress wall), is somewhat foreordained given its Shakespearean source, and the resolution arrives with a slight sense of inevitability rather than devastation, making it the one marginally less extraordinary element of an otherwise masterful film.