I saw this movie when IFC was giving a Japanese movie nearly every day or every weekend. In the last 9 years of my life I believe it is safe to say that i have watched more Japanese cinema than I have given attention to any other kind and it was in this period that I watched Sword of Doom that I watched the most Japanese films out of my entire life.I watched this movie again last night (possibly 6 years after I originally saw it)and I did so by accident. First off, I did not remember that THIS movie was called Sword of Doom- that is how I ended up watching it a 2nd time by accident. When a movie is so bad that I don't even remember it's title- that is bad.So far I have only given you my opinion. Let me give the only 'fact' I can give about this movie- and why I hate it. It is SLOW. VERY slow. I watched the movie for 20-30 minutes of 2x speed last night and it was STILL too slow- I kid you not. Sometimes I fast forwarded it by 4x speed and higher and it was still very tedious to watch- I am not this way with any other movies. I treated this movie differently than I have treated others because of how slow it is.The good thing about this movie: The main antagonist which appears to be a emotionless snake of a man. A 'badass' if you will- the guy who goes around killing innocent people and not showing a shed of remorse- his character is cool to look at. I am aware that some anime and maybe even some other movies have attempted to make a character just like him and this actor that pulls off this persona (although it may not be highly original) does a VERY good job at it. In other words the main bad guy is an interesting one- but after about 20 minutes his character gets old and I am tired of seeing his emotionless silent self. I want to see him get angry but he never does. I want to see him interested in SOMETHING but he never shows interest in much of anything. It's as if he is a walking ghost. Which as I tried to say is cool at first, but gets old after a while.The bad about this movie is nearly everything else. The pace and the dialogue is beyond boring for me to sit through and I cannot justify doing it because I see no reward in me sitting around for the end. I can't imagine an ending for this movie that is not predictable and therefore there is not enough suspense in it for me to enjoy or to even recommend for someone else to enjoy. Anyone smart and who knows the value of their time and how to manage their life well will not sit through this garbage. There are so many better videos to watch out there. Even real fencing videos as opposed to this. Or anime with other badass main villains and a more interesting suspenseful action-packed story. Sword of the Stranger for example...Check it out.

Here, in one of Nakadai's best performances, he plays a young, seemingly evil Samurai who lives by his own moral code. He ruthlessly slays anyone who he thinks should die, and it's hard to say whether his killings are unjust or deserved, even though his actions might seem despicable at first. For example, in the beginning of the film, he encounters an ageing pilgrim praying for a quick death. Upon hearing this, Nadakai's character kills him in one swift move. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Nakadai's fighting style echo's his attitude to an extent, it's an ultra defensive style in which he never strikes the first blow. In an iconic scene later on in the film, Mifune's older and wiser samurai tells Nakadai, "The sword is the soul. Study the soul to know the sword. Evil mind, evil sword." In Japanese culture, the sword and style of a samurai could be seen as a window to his soul and "Sword of Doom" beautifully yet brutally echoes this sentiment. In the penultimate scene of the film, Nakadai's samurai is haunted by his past actions and starts to hallucinate, he is clearly a broken man and regrets some of his actions. The ending of the film is surely a controversial one but I personally loved it. Nothing is resolved, apparently there were sequels planned but they never came to light for one reason or another. Nevertheless, it didn't take away anything from the film and for me it actually added to the mystique and moral ambiguity of Nakadai's character. Impeccably shot and beautifully choreographed, the film is a feast for the eyes. Nakadai's performance as a self destructive samurai was highly intense and full of emotion, his shift in character alone was astonishing and really displayed Nakadai's talent as a versatile actor. Mifune is also in the film and has his fair share of excellent scenes and lines. In summary, an excellent film that I'd recommend to anyone with a remote interest in Samurai movies.

I won't go on at length about the film, because others have already done so, and well enough.I will add my opinion about the ending, though.Let me begin by saying that I understand the film was intended to be the first part of a trilogy, and so the unresolved ending could easily be attributed to a "cliffhanger" ending that might be resolved in a second film; however, we don't get the rest of that trilogy, so we must contend with the film as a complete work of art.With that in mind, I propose that the unresolved ending of the film - the sudden, freeze-frame ending, still within the throes of an unfinished combat - is meant to suggest this: :::Ryunosuke has actually died at some unknown point during the final sword battle; what we are in the process of observing, then, is Ryunosuke in his own real and private Hell, an afterlife of endless opponents, brutal killings, and constant injuries to his own body, none enough to kill him, but enough to cause him pain and torment:::The reasons I see to accept this idea are several: 1) The inn is now on fire; fire is an easy metaphor for Hell (certainly for Western audiences, but possibly for Eastern ones as well). As to that fire, no one is responding to it directly, as people would tend to do if a well-populated inn was burning. There is no sound or image of commotion, shouts, running for exits, etc., as we usually see during burning-building scenes, even when there is a battle going on. 2) The scene immediately before the final battle is focused on ghosts and hauntings - it begins with Omatsu telling the tale of the courtesan who killed herself in the now-unused room, and quickly proceeds to multiple images of Ryunosuke fighting the ghosts of his own victims.3) The room that Ryunosuke is in, and proceeds to tear apart before the attack of the samurai, becomes almost supernatural - the curtain walls he cuts through are endless, repeating, circling back upon themselves - he cannot escape this room, even by cutting his way through and out. Then, the rooms of the inn he fights his way through become endless, maze-like, and repetitive, with no occupants except the endlessly attacking samurai.4) The final freeze-frame suggests to the audience that there is no logical ending to this scene; indeed, it never ends.So there you have my interpretation of the ending of "Sword of Doom". If you like it and ever quote it, please give me, and this review, the credit!

This is a very grim film which attempts to explore the connection between power (or, if you will, skill) and evil. We're treated to scenes of intense violence punctuated by periods of relative calm in the life of Ryunosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), an expert martial arts swordsman with no clan loyalties who gets caught up in a cycle of revenge after killing an opponent (Ichiro Nakaya) in a duel. He compounds his problems by running away with his bitter wife (Michiyo Aratama), who is pregnant from an encounter with Ryunosuke by which she hoped to save her husband's life before the duel. Ryunosuke spends the rest of his years drinking sake and working for some kind of assassination mafia, while waiting for the man's younger brother Hyoma (Yuzo Kayama) to seek him out for revenge.The best thing about the film is the intense visuals – director Okamoto frames the action with psychological intent and Murai's photography emphasizes the hopelessness and desolation of Ryunosuke's situation. The battle scenes at the end are viscerally effective, even if for my taste they were a bit excessive. Basically it made Ryunosuke into more of a mythic figure as opposed to a human one. It's certainly possible to make an exciting Samurai/Ronin film without departing so far from reality – for instance in Kurosawa's famous "Seven Samurai" we have 7 trained warriors fighting 30-something relatively untrained fighters on horseback… a relatively realistic though still daunting encounter. But in "Sword of Doom" we have one man becoming a killing machine, dispatching dozens of men within minutes. In this finale and in the battle where sword-master Toranosuke Shimada (Toshiro Mifune) defends himself from an assassination attempt, the assailants wait to attack one by one like video game opponents. It's reminiscent of Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" as well as later films like DePalma's version of "Scar Face" and Tarantino's "Kill Bill". I understand that this is a stylized presentation of violence and I understand that not it's not requisite that film be realistic, but to me this type of action is like slashing with the sword instead of stabbing – a lot of blood is spilt but none of the wounds are deep. Eventually we reach a point where all that's left is action without real violence. And in that case it becomes very difficult to form a critique of violence -- which I think was the primary goal of this film.Just generally speaking the conclusion of this film was unsatisfactory to me. All this drama was built up around Hyoma, and unless I missed something in the flurry of killings nothing ever happened to this major element in the plot. Also totally unresolved was the issue of Hyoma's love for Omatsu (Yoko Naito), a young girl who was in danger of becoming a concubine. Either I missed this resolution, or this film was intended to end on a cliffhanger. Basically though the last time we see Omatsu she's cowering in fear in a corner of the dojo and Ryunosuke goes ballistic because of something she says about her father. Now there's several ways to see this – we could conclude that Omatsu is safe because Ryunosuke is now fully distracted by his dementia. Why did Ryunosuke become so upset over the mention of her father, who he so casually slaughtered at the beginning of the film? Was he driven mad by the realization that he was caught in a "circle of fate", with his former victims returning to even the score of fate? He didn't seem intimidated by the idea of Hyoma's vengeance, so it seems odd that he would be so upset by the news that Hyoma's girlfriend was the grand-daughter of the random pilgrim he killed that sunny afternoon – unless the killing wasn't random? It's not inherently bad for a film to leave the audience with questions of course. But for me these are not questions that have any real weight or consequence.All in all, I think the film deserves credit for some thrilling sequences but it does not add up to any kind of substantial or relevant theme. The only thing we really get is "an evil mind makes the evil sword" – where Ryunosuke's father had insisted that his skill and power with the sword had gotten to his head and made him evil, Shimada's conclusion is that he was evil in the first place and that caused him to become an evil warrior. To me it's not a hugely interesting premise and the film didn't do enough to make it relevant to my life.