Seven Samurai
On the Mud-Caked Precipice of Greatness.
Evil bandits are terrorising a peaceful village of farmers, waiting for all the hard work of harvest to be done to reap what others sow. The workers are fed up of this highway robbery, and decide to hire some hired swords to repel those thieves.
They search for samurai, but most are offended at the mere though of working for food. On the way home they finally find help, an experienced samurai tired of fighting. He recruits like-minded people for his suicide mission, assembling 6 willing guys. The seventh one follows them from afar, mocking them at every turn.
The seventh ranger quickly earns his place in the gang after he navigates around the irrational fear of the villagers that the samurai, armed upper class people, will come to rescue them but ravish they woman and eat their food.
As soon as they get to the village, they gather intel, shore up the existing defences and create new ones, train smaller squads of auxiliary fighters, in addition to the regular agricultural work. Wave after wave of bandits are repelled by the gang using a variety of tactics. Some in the gang fall to the few muskets the attackers bring, before they are snatched.
The final battle on the rain is chaos on massive muddy fields. Horses, people, weapons, all fighting the elements, not only the enemy. It’s quite anticlimactic that all bandits are taken care of but not everyone notices at once, the fight stops.
The villagers are the big winners of the whole ordeal. The younger samurai had an affair with a younger nubile, but that is best forgotten once the village is safe. The remaining 3 samurai walk away without riches or honour (as expected), the feeling of a job well done being the only positive experience.
This is the benchmark of all ensemble impromptu gangs doing stuff, from Ocean’s Eleven to The Avengers (even when they don’t even know it). Still raises headband and shoulder pads above them all.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.