This title was drawn from my notes and lists, likely because some critics put it among the best films ever made. Its director Haruki Kadokawa is not that well known but he had his own production company and made many commercially successful films for the Japanese market in the 1980s to 1990s. This one was also very successful. Unfortunately it leans heavily on the audience being familiar with the historical events that the film is about and is rather cryptic and dry if you know nothing about them.

Nagao Kagetora rules Echigo province during the Sengoku Period. He is well liked by his followers and considered honorable. He is unmarried, apparently due to a promise made to the Buddha, but he and Nami, the daughter of one of his retainers Usami Sadamitsu, clearly have feelings for one another. All of them can see that conflict with Takeda Shingen, another daimyō who has conquered the neighboring Shinano province and is now looking farther afield, is inevitable. While fighting against another lord however, Kagetora is led to do some disgraceful deeds which led to him putting down his leadership. But when Takeda begins his conquest in earnest into Echigo province, his followers seek him out to persuade him to lead them again. He then changes his name to Uesugi Kenshin and the stage is set for the famous Battle of Kawanakajima between him and Takeda Shingen.

As noted, this film is aimed at Japanese audiences who are already familiar with the historical tale and there is no hand-holding for anyone to whom all this is new. There is a fair amount of detail here involving historical personnages and their posts as well as military maneuvers covering specific geographical positions. All this is naturally indecipherable to most non-Japanese. It doesn’t help either that it’s filmed like a historical record instead of a conventional film. Many scenes are very short and there are significant time skips between them with the precise date of each scene given in text. This makes it hard to emotionally engage with the characters and appreciate the dramatic arc of the story. As such we know that Kenshin’s relationship with Nami is kind of a big deal and so is his supposed nobility compared to Shingen, but it all feels too disconnected to leave much of an impression on us.

Even if most of the impact of this film is lost on us, there are still elements that we can appreciate. There’s a sublime beauty to many of the scenery shots that perfectly capture the intended atmosphere. I love that the battles depicted here are much more realistic than anything I’ve seen recently. Tactics and formations matter. Battles take hours to resolve. Even though the audience is meant to mostly root for Kenshin, the film doesn’t show his forces to be laughably outnumbered by Shingen. They are in fact more or less equal and the good guys so to speak don’t get a surprise reinforcing force out of nowhere to save the day. There are no superheroic combatants who lay waste to everyone around them. The generals are smart enough not to wade into combat themselves until they really need to. It’s all very satisfying. The most unrealistic part is that they don’t want to show horses getting hurt or dying, probably for animal cruelty reasons.

That’s not enough to recommend this to international audiences. You really do need to know the legend beforehand. Being an aficionado of medieval combat would probably help too. But I can see why this was a big hit in Japan at the time and I don’t regret spending the time watching it, if only because it led me to reading up more on that period of history.