Shogun Review

Shogun Review

This week I thought I would return to a historical movie/film review.  I’ve been watching the 2024 Shogun production by FX and thought it was a perfect subject.  Get ready for spoilers but also comparison with the 1980 Shogun miniseries starring Mifune Toshiro, Richard Chamberlain, and Shimada Yoko. Apologies in advance for not have a Japanese keyboard, meaning, no accent marks…

Shogun is a TV series based on the 1975 novel of the same name by James Clavell.  As an aside, Shogun is the first in his series on Asia, primarily Hong Kong, which includes titles which bring the reader all the way forward to the Iranian revolution of the 1970s. In this regard Shogun is a bit of a prequel, though little related to the future novels except for the fact that one of the protagonists in 1966’s Taipan is a descendent of Shogun’s John Blackthorne, the “Anjin” of Shogun.

Of course the story of Shogun takes place at the end of the warring states period in Japan, a time when the military dictatorship had been fractured for around two centuries, leaving control of the country to a group of warlords, or daimyo of varying power. The period of Shogun is the end of the seemingly endless civil wars, as power began to recentralize.  Three great men were responsible for this, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and, key to the current drama, Tokugawa Ieyasu (the Yoshi Toronaga of Shogun).

The Story of Shogun, then, is the story of Tokugawa/Toronaga's rise to power and establishment of a dynasty that would rule Japan for the next two and a half centuries.

We have three prisms through which Shogun shows us the story. We start the story with John Blackthorne, played by Cosmo Jarvis.  Blackthorne, or the Anjin (Pilot) as he is know in Japan, is our way to relate to Japan as fellow outsiders. Today Mariko a Catholic Japanese based on the historical Maria Grazia, played by Anna Sawai, helps Blackthorne to understand Japanese life while also introducing Japan to European life, and she is the love interest for the production. Finally, the main star is Toronaga himself, played by Hiroyuki Sanada.  Sanada plays the role in a different way from Japanese superstar Mifune Toshiro played him in the original. Mifune wore his stoic armor thoroughly, as was common in the Samurai movie culture of the 70s. Sanada is just as subtle, but more readily shows his humanity.

Sanada, in fact, was a producer of the current Shogun. He is well known for telling FX that if Japanese culture were not properly and accurately reflected in the production, he and the whole Japanese team would quit.  He, and they, stayed, and the result was an amazing production. I am loathe to compare it with the original. They reflect different times and served different audiences. Richard Harrison, Mifune, and the others played Shogun in a theatrical way reflective of their times.  Today's production is much dirtier and gritty, befitting current mores. The original was much more blatant about the budding relationship between Blackthorne and Mariko, and had Blackthorne adapt to Japan at a seemingly impossible speed which the new production did not attempt. In terms of straight history, this version acknowledged that muskets had been in use in Japan for nearly a century by this time, and that modern artillery was the real innovation and also expertise that Blackthorne could provide.

Other plots from the book which were ignored in the original production got needed play in this one, particularly the role of the Lady Ochiba  no  Kata, histories Yodo-dono in leading the attempt to kill Toronaga and crush his clan, as well as showing the intrigue that Toronaga was able to paralyze the Council of Regents and their leader, Ishido, rather than largely telling us about it, as the original did.

Today's Shogun is, frankly, an amazing production, from the weekly opener of the zen garden with Blackthorne's ship disturbing everything to the grittier representations of the landscape and combat, to showing us the behind the scenes maneuvering rather than blowing its entire budget on mass battle scenes which might have been breathtaking but would have lacked the nuanced approach to the history that we got.

Overall, Shogun was AWESOME, and I highly recommend both it and the original.