“Shōgun,” James Clavell’s great novel about lordly machinations in feudal Japan, has been turned into a major miniseries for the second time and will premiere Tuesday on FX and Hulu. Every review you read about this series will compare it to “Game of Thrones” and I won't stop stating the obvious. In fact, I imagine it was an essential part of the pitch that sold the show.
Set in 1600, at the cusp of the Sengoku and Edo periods, Clavell's story involves renowned historical figures representing not necessarily historical events. Its three main characters are the shipwrecked John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), based on the navigator William Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan, who would become a samurai; Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), who replaces Tokugawa Ieyasu, a great lord, president of the council of regents who will govern Japan until the heir comes of age; and Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), inspired by Hosokawa Gracia, a Catholic convert from a disgraced family line, was enlisted in Clavell's narrative to translate between the two men.
There's a lot of plot and subplot, and a lot of secondary and tertiary characters to run it. The main conflicts are between Blackthorne, an English Protestant, and the well-established Portuguese Catholic clergy, who, protecting his missionary and mercantile interests, would like to see him dead; Blackthorne and Japan itself, a place he does not want to be and does not understand, in the same way that the Japanese, who call him “the barbarian”, do not understand him; and Toranaga and Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira), a rival lord, who wants to eliminate Toranaga and bend the regents, who are not an impressive group in any case, to his will.
The most friendly relations, which are also full of conflict, are between Blackthorne and Toranaga, into whose possession he comes; Toranaga and Mariko, whom she appoints as Blackthorne's in-house translator and whom she trusts to speak frankly; and Mariko and Blackthorne, who start a kind of romance, although she is married to the samurai Toda Hirokatsu, or Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe), with her close friends, a jealous guy.
Hiroyuki Sanada plays the great lord Yoshii Toranaga in “Shogun.”
(Colin Bentley/FX)
That said, not all of these relationships, nor many others that fill the 10-hour series, come to life on screen. There are some touching scenes, mostly between characters who have known each other for a long time, but one tends to focus on individuals concerned with their own destiny rather than how they relate to each other (it's a lonely crowd) and on the actors and their charisma. particular, of which there is no shortage.
Although he may seem cruel and arbitrary (certainly by 21st century Western standards), it is impossible not to identify Toranaga as the good guy in this fight, if only because of the air of gravity and nobility that Sanada projects (and because Hira exudes vibes bad boy of his body). the beginning). Like Mariko, Sawai, most recently seen in “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” is the picture of melancholy resolve, and the filmmakers manage to highlight her otherworldly beauty, filling the screen with her face at every opportunity. They are reason enough to look.
Jarvis, who sounds like he studied Richard Burton to shape his speech, is perfectly fine and delivers several scenes of heroic deeds; However, for a central character, he is irrelevant, not only in this historical moment but also in the lives of those closest to Blackthorne; This is less a romance than a political drama. That he doesn't have any special chemistry with Sawai seems almost as much a matter of concept as casting.
There is a pall of sadness that hangs over many characters. They exchange fatalistic philosophical aphorisms and melancholic poetry; some commit suicide or threaten to commit suicide or are told to commit suicide or would like to commit suicide for what we would consider a bad source of shame. (It is a conceptual obstacle that the viewer needs to overcome). Tadanobu Asano as Kashigi Yabushige, a scheming minor lord who cooks a man to death out of interest, but who, thanks to Asano's brilliant performance, is a conceptual hurdle he must overcome. one of the most attractive characters in the series; the Spanish captain Vasco Rodrigues (Néstor Carbonell), who will teach Blackthorne the concept of karma; and Gin (Yuko Miyamoto), a lady who dreams of creating a large red light district in Edo, where Toranaga is building its capital.
It's something sumptuous, a big production that makes the '80s miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain, Yoko Shimada and Toshiro Mifune look like… an '80s miniseries. (It was a big hit in its time, mind you.) . We have an earthquake, a typhoon, digital armies marching on digital cities, elaborate suits of armor, beautifully constructed town streets and palatial neighborhoods. Although one might expect some great battle scenes, the story takes place at a time of relative peace, although there is plenty of intrigue and trickery, and the violent action tends to occur in close quarters and involve comparatively few combatants at a time.
In fact, Toranaga – who claims he does not want to be shōgun, the nation's absolute authority, considering the title “a brutal relic of a bygone era” – is trying to avoid war and still get his way. History will have other plans, but they are outside the scope of this series. If you come here expecting the Battle of Sekigahara, you will be disappointed. But subtlety and cunning can also be exciting.
