A lousy ending and a 40 yr old midget playing lead RUINED it!!!

You seem to be a troll, but just in case you aren't, here goes. You have nothing to say of any inherent value about this film, so why did you write this impertinent drivel?

"Lastly, ("lastly"? Where was the "firstly"?) the actor picked to play the son as an 25 yr old was waaaay out of character. He was tall and slim as a. Ruined the whole whole movie. I won't mention other points that was not realistic b/c i don't want to include spoilers."

Move over Tadao Sato and Mark Lefanu! You can't even hold together a syntactically sound sentence. As for the remark about "other points that was not realistic" , unsurprisngly full of dodgy syntax, I've seen your "credentials", and your in no position to take umbrage with any film predicated on a supposed lack of verisimilitude!

The language of Hollywood cinema couldn't be more antithetical to realist filmmaking, be it the manifest inadequacy of the acting, which precludes any belief in the characters as plausible because they are too busy trying to simulate "coolness", having an orgasm thinking of all the nauseating adolescents drooling over them. Characters exist for two purposes in Hollywood; firstly, to titilate and inflame the passions of the audience with their voluptuous figures, and secondly to simply move the plot along, rarely if ever leaving room for crystalised character development.

Then there's the excessive music that saturates every scene, coercing our emotions, and if it isn't embarassingly fantastical, it's immoderately saccharine, and all in all it affronts good taste. Sentimental, lachrymatory pus! I'm all for music that appeals to the sentiments, but Hollywood soundtracks leave you vomiting copious amounts of sugar or in the case of the "darker" films in Hollywood, they simply keep repeating the same old cliches that do nothing to complement or multiply the effect the imagery. It's like going to a theme park, all nausea and headaches, all pre-packaged adolescent thrills without an edifying message to mitigate it.

No argument about the distortions of reality Hollywood is culpable of would be complete without a mention of CGI. It doesn't even create an illusion, so incapable of duplicating the intricacies of reality is it. So the question has to be, why on earth are you even mentioning reality, or even better, how old are you? If you're looking for reality, be it objective or subjective, psychological or external, the last place to look for it is in Hollywood. All hollywood does is travesty human existence, with it's rigid, uniform structures underlying the films, it's tawdry, sickly cinematography and it's content aimed at uncultured, unsophisticated jelly-heads like yourself.

As for this film, Mizoguchi was one of cinema's great aesthetes, whose eye for pictorial composition is arguably unmatched in the history of the medium, and although this film certainly has an emotional verity, and touches on the harsh realities of medieval Japan, the film is based on a myth set in the remote past, somewhat attenuating your argument for it not being realistic, by virtue of the fact that Mizoguchi was never trying to capture an objective view of reality, because he is a stylist and is working with a period of history with very little historiography. Oh, and of course it would have helped if you had developed that argument, to avoid leaving the reader having to infer for himself/herself what dimension of cinematic realism you are infering to, child.

As for the comment about the ending, only an automaton would be left unmoved by it. You say it had a horrible ending, but what makes it horrible? The only thing that's horrible is the way your mind works, you odious, unthinking, unfeeling subject. It's consummately easy to make bold judgements, much more difficult to convince the more lucid reader that you actually know something, and that you know not what you are talking about is quite evident from the fact that you are incapable of forming a cogent critique of this film. The comment about not wanting to give away any spoilers is a risible evasion. The sheer insanity of people like you is beyond remedy.

Maybe you were expecting Sansho and his "armies" to take on Zushio and the emancipated slaves in one big sanguinary conflagration, with lots of slow-motion effects and CGI, but this was made in an age where there were still directors interested in human beings, human problems. Or maybe you were expecting an ending that turns all the prior events on it's head, Zushio turns out to be a woman, Anju isn't dead, Sansho turns into a big spider and we're no longer in Heian era Japan but some computer generated void. People back then couldn't do endings for s**t? What do you know? You can't critique a film for s**t.