G.I. Samurai (1979)

G.I. Samurai (1979)
Aka: Time Slip; I Want To
Japanese Title: 戦国自衛隊
Translation: Sengoku Self-Defense Force (or Warring States Self-Defense Force)

 

Starring: Shin'ichi Chiba, Tsunehiko Watase, Isao Natsuyagi, Kenzô Kawarasaki, Shin Kishida, Asao Koike, Shinkoma Kokontei, Kentarô Kudô, Isao Kuraishi, Masao Kusakari, Shin'ichirô Mikami, Yoichi Miura, Kôji Naka, Hirohisa Nakata, Noboru Nakaya
Director: Kôsei Saitô
Action Director: n/a

The idea of modern man travelling back in time is an old one, something that all of us have often fantasized about. Although I’m pretty sure that modern shows like Game of Thrones and The Tudors have made times/places like Medieval Europe far less appetizing than we used to envision them, I think a lot of us at some point have imagined ourselves going back to a simpler time…and then using our modern smarts to get ahead and become important. Obviously, people today who spend all of their lives on their smart phones will probably discover that their abilities to contribute are limited…but send a mechanical engineer back in time and he’ll probably kick some major butt anywhere he goes!

On the same token, the idea of bringing modern weaponry and warfare into those “simpler” times is an interesting one. For example, what would happen to history if you taught certain Native American tribes on the East Coast to use AR-15s right as the Puritans or Huguenots were arriving? Or gave 50-caliber machine guns to the Chinese and Central Asian tribes when the Mongolians were expanding their empire? This idea occasionally comes up in movies. In The Iceman Cometh (1990), the climax is set against the backdrop of Yuen Wah trying to smuggle pistols and Uzis into the Ming Dynasty. The big baddie’s evil scheme in Tiger Claws II is to invade Ancient China with modern weaponry and establish himself as the supreme ruler.

Then there’s G.I. Samurai.

Based on a novel by Ryo Hanmura, this movie tells the story of group of Japanese Self-Defense Force reserve soldiers who are on a training mission when time portal opens and transports them back to the Sengoku Period during the 16^th century[1]. Their commanding officer is Lieutenant Yoshiaki Iba (Sonny Chiba, of The Street Fighter and Karate Warriors). In addition to the soldiers, all of their equipment comes with them, including a tank, a jeep with a machine gun mounted on it, an armored personel carrier, a couple of trucks, a boat, and a helicopter. Those last two are each manned by three soldiers of their respective branches of the JSDF. That makes about twenty some-odd soldiers, plus transportation and ammunition.

Lieutenant Iba befriends a local samurai warlord, Nagao Kagetora (Isao Natsuyaga, of Heaven and Earth and Ninja Warriors). Kagetora is fighting against the Kuroda Clan on behalf of his lord, whom he despises on account of the guy ordering everybody around while never leaving his castle. Iba helps Kategora defeat the Kuroda army, and the two strike up a bromance of sorts.

As time passes, some of the men venture away from the beach they’re camped out at and start interacting with the locals. Mimura (Kôji Naka, of the Sukeban Deka TV show), the platoon’s sniper, gets himself a girlfriend from among the villagers. Another soldier becomes the adopted brother of a couple of young boys and discharges himself from the outfit. A couple of guys are stalked through the forest and killed by samurai belonging to…you know…I’m not really sure who those guys were. Were they remnants of the Kuroda army? Were they spies from the Kagetora’s lord who’s all butthurt that Iba doesn’t want to show his technology to him?

The most pressing matter, however, is the mutiny led by Hayato Yano (Tsunehiko Watase, of the Taxi Driver Mystery Diaries films), one of Iba’s men. There is some bad blood between Yano and Iba, as the former was involved in some shady military business some years before and it was Iba who busted him (or his superiors). In any case, Yano and some of the men hijack the boat and become pirates, sailing up and down the coast, indiscriminately murdering villagers, stealing their food and raping their women. In fact, they transform the hull of the boat into one big 24-hour rape dungeon. As much as Iba doesn’t want to his own men, he has to step in and stop Yano.

Having resolved that, Iba and Kagetora team up again to overthrow the latter’s lord, who’s still cooped up in his castle. Iba’s initial reasoning is that the more mayhem he and his men cause, the more the so-called God of Time will want to send them back to the present just to keep things normal. Unfortunately, the more Iba fights, the more he feels that he could…and then should…overthrow the Shogun and rule Japan himself.

G.I. Samurai has an odd plot structure. The first thirty or forty minutes do a fine job of establishing the premise and setting up the relationship between Yoshiaki Iba and Nagao Kagetora, kindred spirits from different time periods. But then the subplot involving Yano pops up and the entire movie stops for almost a half hour just so Sonny Chiba can resolve the problem. Everything about Feudal Japan and the samurai is forgotten about during this part. Although Yano is established early on as having a violent streak, I thought the film would end up allying him with one of the rival armies. Instead, he gets his own story independent of everything else that’s going on.

For much of the film, I was complaining to myself about the lack of a defined villain. The raid on the castle in the early part of the second half doesn’t have much of a build up: there are no scenes of daimyo scheming against Kagetora or the modern-day soldiers. Nor are there scenes of him at least sending his men to spy on them. He just sort of shows up during the battle is killed. When Iba takes on the army of the neighboring lord, Shingen, the same happens. A big battle breaks out—the climax of the film, in fact—but Lord Shingen himself is treated like an afterthought.

So, who’s the villain of the piece? Although you can make an argument that it’s the Shogun and his retainers, I think the real villain is Yoshiaki Iba himself. As one reviewer pointed out, Sonny Chiba’s character represents the “masculine desire for power and domination.” At first, he wants to protect his soldiers and not kill any of the locals. However, the more time he spends with Kagetora, the more he identifies with the man’s ambitions for power. He loses sight of his men’s well-being in his quest to conquer Japan…and let’s be honest, even without the losses sustained in the battle against Shingen, he’d still run out of fuel and ammo at some point. Iba is initially a good man, but he gradually becomes bad as he sins against both his men and Time itself.

Sonny Chiba was always a Man’s man, and the guy had mojo to spare, especially in the 1970s. While not a complete sausage fest, this is very much a movie about men being macho. The women here are largely treated as sex objects and the only woman who gets a line is an old lady who says that one of the soldiers reminds her of her dead grandson. This film not only fails the infamous Bechdel Test, it triumphantly strides to the front of the classroom, tears the test to shreds, throws it away, pisses in the wastebasket, and then flips off the teacher.

The most striking example of that occurs right before the climactic battle. Lieutenant Iba informs his men that he made arrangements with the villagers for them to sleep with the local widow. Wait…what? Was this really a thing in Feudal Japan? That villages would set aside someone for soldiers to work off their “excess energies” on, presumably so as to not rape everybody else? So yeah, three of Chiba’s subordinates head to the woman’s house, strip down to their underwear, and then meet up with three soldiers (also in their undies-diaper thingies) from the opposing army who are there for the same purpose.

I think there’s some sort of commentary in this scene about how people are people, especially when it comes to armies in feudal societies, or where its conscripted. Where there are no ideologies involved, most people fighting a war don’t even want to be there and, under normal circumstances, could be friends. This was a theme of Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors of Magic Mountain, for example. But to explore this theme in a scene where six guys run a train on a widow is just…bizarre. Imagine a movie about WW2 in which American GIs and German soldiers, on the eve of the Battle of the Bulge, met at Stavelot to gangbang a willing Belgian woman. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

The showstopper of G.I. Samurai is a thirty-minute battle sequence in which our soldiers take on hundreds of armed samurai, plus riflemen, archers, spearmen, etc. on an open plain. I’m sure that hundreds of stuntmen were employed for this epic sequence. It very much has a 300 of Sparta feel to it, with a small group taking on a much larger one. However, instead of benefitting from the local geography, our heroes have automatic weapons, grenades and military hardware to protect them. There is one sequence where one of the trucks is driven into a ditch, from which dozens of men in brown outfits (matching the dirt) emerge and start throwing shuriken at the soldiers. Oooh…Lord Shingen has ninja in his employ, too! Look for a young Hiroyuki Sanada as a ninja who holds onto bottom of the helicopter as it’s flying, and then jumps from it as it plummets to the earth. There are dozens of explosions followed by stuntmen performing somersaults, which by 1979, had become an art form in Japanese media with shows like Super Sentai and Kamen Rider.

People looking for martial arts will not get very much of that. There is some limited swordplay here and there, mainly when Kagetora fights off his lord’s bodyguards. There is also a brief sword duel between Lt. Iba and Lord Shingen, too. However, most of the action is of the shooting variety, which may disappoint some viewers expecting a Street Fighter fix of fighting. Also, being a late 70s Japanese film, most of the soundtrack is made up of 70s Japanese folk rock ballads, which was the style of the time. They needed a more traditional composer for this movie, not the song “Endless Way.” There is enough large-scale action to satisfy, but G.I. Samurai is a uniquely Japanese film that definitely could not be made this way today.

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[1] - The Warring States period started in the 15th century, but as the armies already have riflemen in their ranks, it would have be set after 1543.

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