← Back to the Library

What Is the Blade of the Immortal Film?

Takashi Miike's hundredth film: a superstar Manji, a Cannes premiere, and a samurai picture made by a director who counted it as a homecoming.

Warner Bros. Japan released the live-action Blade of the Immortal on April 29, 2017, directed by Takashi Miike from a screenplay by Tetsuya Oishi. The production was billed, accurately, as the one hundredth film of Miike's career. Takuya Kimura, cast, in Miike's phrase, as the strongest member of his gang, plays Manji; Hana Sugisaki, spotted by the director in a television commercial, plays both Rin and Manji's sister Machi; Sota Fukushi is Anotsu and Erika Toda is Makie. The film condenses the manga's opening war, the hiring, the Mugai-ryu, the road to Mount Takao, into 141 minutes, and it premiered out of competition at Cannes in May 2017.

The theatrical run underperformed, grossing about $8.4 million, a result Japanese coverage tied partly to the disbanding of Kimura's group SMAP months earlier. The film then did what Miike films do: it travelled. Critics received it warmly, 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 72 on Metacritic, praising the choreography and the two leads, and home video sales in Japan and abroad were strong. Samura, who had rejected Hollywood approaches for the changes they tend to make, endorsed this one in terms any adapter would frame: arrangements were made, he said, and as a film it was completed with perfect quality, made as he expected.

Blade of the Immortal volume 14 Japanese cover, Afternoon KC — **VOLUME 14**Volume 14 of the Japanese tankobon, Afternoon KC. Samura painted all thirty covers himself, and they were never redesigned.

THE PRODUCTION, IN BRIEF

Miike at one hundred

The casting logic

Miike chose Kimura as he had chosen the manga: for a popularity that matched the source. Kimura had carried Japanese screens for two decades, as Blade of the Immortal had carried its magazine.

The hardest scene

The closing battle, hundreds of combatants on one field at Mount Takao, was shot in Kyoto and was, by the production's account, the most difficult sequence to stage. Its set pieces favour the manga's exotic arsenal: oversized pronged swords, chained blades, weapons built like tools.

The revenge theme

Miike has said the theme that drew him was revenge that does not conclude: Rin's quest and Manji's penance are both debts that payment does not cancel, which he paralleled with a film career that also refuses to end.

The afterlife

Third best-selling foreign-language film on UK home video in 2018, behind two anime features: the samurai picture found its audience on shelves, which is where this Library lives too.

What Is the Blade of the Immortal Film?

THE PRODUCTION, IN BRIEF

THE FIRST WORD