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 Takashi Miike’s “Thirteen Assassins” remake has widely considered as one of Japan’s best films of 2010, therefore, the director is back with another effort to remake another classic in Japan’s movie history. This time, Miike’s target is the 1963 Cannes Film Festival’s Special Jury Award winner “Harakiri” (Japanese: Seppuku) directed by acclaimed filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi. Miike’s new film originally titled “Ichimei” in Japan language that loosely translated as “A Life”, a complete contradictory to the international release title “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai”, right? The 1962 film itself was actually an adaptation of “Ibun rônin-ki” novel written by Yasuhiko Takiguchi about an out of work samurai who wants to commit seppuku (the "honorable" ex-warrior suicide by ritual disembowelment) in the house of a Lord, but there, he learns of the fate of his son-in-law, a young samurai who sought work at the house but was instead barbarically forced to commit traditional harakiri in an excruciating manner. It sounds more like an intimist revenge drama, than a spectacular & epic movie like in “Thirteen Assassins” scale.

But the original film itself, despite its samurai genre categorization, wasn’t an action film at all. It is an intelligent anti-samurai film that's primary concern is exposing much of the honor surrounding them and their times has been falsified. Other thing that makes it so great is its simplicity and its intensity. Anyone could understand this movie without being a foreign film buff or scholar of Japanese history.In Kobayashi’s hands, “Harakiri” also became a criticism of the then current Japanese society that used their samurai history as its subject, but most of the points it makes are truer of the east and west today, as the idea of working for one company for life has all but disappeared. The film explores many issues including conflicting obligations, adherence to ritual and tradition, superficial honor vs. true honor, political corruption, presented truth vs. actual truth, and loyalty to the profession vs. loyalty to the family. It looks at how everyone clings to perceived rank even when it is no longer the case, considers how much one should stray from their values at a time when everyone else has strayed from theirs, and illustrates how a more complete truth can totally change the meaning of a true story. That’s why it must be a very difficult challenge for Takashi Miike to produce a remake that can stand close to the integrity of the original. From its Cannes presentation back in May 2011, “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai” received pretty mixed reviews since people were expecting another Miike’s battle frenzy samurai film, while this new one is more of a down-to-earth drama. And instead of constructing the labyrinthine narrative like a mystery (as Kobayashi’s version excellently accomplishes), Miike proposes the entire flashback sequence as a wholesale melodrama. This decision decisively brings the entire momentum of his film to a sudden halt. But as revealed by the trailer, the film indeed offers dazzling visuals – some of them are directly coming from the 1962 film – and, well, it is pretty nice to see Miike taking a more reflective tone than usual.