The return of the magnificent – the Public.en

Movies The Magnificent Seven

In 1960, when John Sturges directed The Magnificent Seven (and path has helped make Steve McQueen a star), and many spoke of the film be an adaptation to the codes of the western of the Seven Samurai Akira Kurosawa – which in themselves were a sort of western, east on seven ronin (samurais mercenaries) that gather together to protect a village threatened by evil and corruption.

The remake that Antoine Fuqua now makes the film Sturges is an object stranger: this film is unnecessary, that there is only the need for the dying MGM monetize its collection of "content". But it is also – compliment — a film that does not invent, nor updates, nor does it change the coordinates of the Magnificent Seven the originals, which seeks to recover a certain innocence, a certain simplicity of the western classic. And the effort, even that does not reach entirely there, is meritorious.

The changes made by the screenwriters Nic Pizzolatto (creator of the series True Detective), and Richard Wenk are mostly cosmetic, transferring the history of Mexico to the West of California, doing these seven gunmen hired to protect a village from the baron miner that wants to expel, a flock multicultural that includes an oriental, an indian and a mexican, with a black lead. Is the case to say that these new Magnificent Seven reflect the contemporary America at the same time that they highlight the pioneering and emigration that gave way. In the naturalness with which the assume, the film does more for tolerance than all the films of prestige well-intentioned but dramatically inert swarming in festivals type Sundance.

The biggest surprise of this remake, however, is to see Antoine Fuqua, a filmmaker indistinct capable of the best and the worst of (and whose last film seen here, Heart of Steel, was downright forgettable), to rediscover the agility and the intelligence of the title that made his name, the Day of the Workout. Not only for the "reunion" between the two stars of this film, Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke (and their complicity is more than evident), but above all by the way as Fuqua puts itself at the service of its story and its actors, and does not seek to invent only to do style. It is as if the director had realized that I would never be able to do better than the original, and, freed of that weight, if you limit the count the better you know the story that you have in front of it. Fuqua does not want to do a western, revisionist or post-modern; just want to make a western the best you know and can. And these new Magnificent Seven can not get to the heels of the original, but not dislike of the scrolls. It is already much more than expected.