Release Year: 1954

Genre: Drama

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Writer: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni

Stars: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura

Hero's journeys don't get any hero-ier than Seven Samurai, the 1954 Eastern-Western that ranks among the most influential films ever made.

Don't believe us? Let us count the ways.

For starters, there's the way the movie brought Japanese and American culture together in completely unexpected ways. The director, Akira Kurosawa, loved cowboy and adventure pictures from Hollywood. He was a huge fan of John Ford (Stagecoach, The Searchers) and John Sturges (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), and he desperately wanted to bring the rhythm and beat of American Westerns to a Japanese story.

He had an era similar to the Wild West in Japanese history to fall back on, when samurai wandered the land without masters and the whole "law-and-order" thing seemed to have taken a permanent vacation. Why not give some of those samurai a classic Wild West problem—bandits raiding a poor village—and see what happens when they tackle it?

The results were an international sensation, which was pretty darn hard to do in the days when computers were physically bigger than your average apartment building. On our side of the Pacific, we learned a little bit more about how Japanese culture functioned. On his side, audiences got a good look at the individualism of the West and how it ran smack into the face of traditional Japanese values like duty and communal obligation. And by giving the Western a distinctly Asian vibe, he actually showed Hollywood filmmakers how to make movies like this. Seven Samurai set the bar for later fantasy-epic-sci-fi-comeoneverybodyjustgivethemallyourmoney blockbuster that followed.

That's right; Star Wars.

One of the biggest, most singularly influential movies ever made owes an open debt to Seven Samurai. So does Harry Potter and the Marvel movie universe, just for starters. Any heist movie, any quest movie, any movie that has a rag-tag gang of misfits getting together and somehow making a go at the big prize…they all got started watching this one.

Not that Seven Samurai was the first movie to figure out those ideas. It was just one of the most unique, made with incredible skill by a man born to stand behind a movie camera. It did so in a way that transcended cultural boundaries, telling a story set in a specific time and place that could be felt anywhere human beings ever lived.

It's a tale of heroism and tragedy, of lingering ideals in a world gone crazy, and what happens when those ideals collide with bitter, compromised reality. It's a tale of brave men with nothing to lose, small men trying to survive, and a larger universe that seemingly just wants to watch them suffer. It's passionate and exciting despite being longer than your average extra-innings ballgame. And in its own way, it made very different parts of the world understand each other just a little bit better.

What's saving the galaxy compared to that?

Hey, remember that movie where George Clooney and Brad Pitt assemble a team of crack thieves to rip off a Las Vegas casino? How about that one where Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen gets some cowboys together to defend a poor Mexican village? Or the sillier version of the same story with Steve Martin, Martin Short and Chevy Chase in the most beautifully ridiculous outfits you've ever seen??

Oh wait, we know: what about that Pixar movie with the insects coming to defend an anthill against a swarm of marauding locusts? You might even remember an unspeakably bad movie called Battle Beyond the Stars that tried to suck up some of that sweet Star Wars mojo in an effort that everyone involved felt profoundly embarrassed to be a part of. Heck, if you really scrape the bottom of the barrel, you might even find an Italian swords-and-sandals flick.

Those are a lot of very different movies: different genres, different eras, different stars. And all of them, every single one, is directly inspired by Seven Samurai. The director, Akira Kurosawa, loved American Westerns, and wanted to apply their ideas to the samurai of ancient Japan. The result was one of the greatest movies ever made (IMDb said so, and who are we to disagree?) and ironically turned the whole Eastern-Western thing into an endless loop of cool.

Seven Samurai borrowed from American movies, then American movies turned around and borrowed from it, producing not just the films we listed above, but movies like Star Wars, Bonnie and Clyde, The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen, The Road Warrior, Saving Private Ryan, Big Hero 6, and Marvel's The Avengers. (John Sturges, whom Kurosawa cited as a major influence in his filmmaking, had already returned the favor in 1960 by directing an American remake: The Magnificent Seven.)

Those films in turn inspired whole new generations of filmmakers, continuing on into the future with no end in sight. You can hardly sneeze without knocking over a movie that has Seven Samurai in its DNA, and for something that actually requires you to read subtitles, you can see how easy it is to grab onto its visual ideas. Don't be surprised if you find yourself saying, "hey it's using that scene in that one movie I really love!" only to realize that the one movie you really love actually pulled it straight out of his one.

Oh, and it also features Toshiro Mifune getting really drunk and some of the coolest sword fights you'll even see.

Say no to it. We dare you.