Here’s the story, in a couple paragraphs: It’s 1876, and Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is an American ex-military officer who’s disillusioned and guilt-ridden by his warrior past: On a ruthless commanding officer’s orders, Nathan and his men slaughtered an Indian village. That same former C.O. recruits him as a well-paid (though still unhappy) mercenary to train the Japanese emperor’s new army. That army’s needed because the old warrior class, the samurai, are in rebellion against the government’s modernizing, Westernizing policies, which are forcing them to give up their historic culture — even down to the clothes and haircuts which symbolized their role in society.

But Nathan gets captured by the samurai and learns to admire, then treasure, their way of life: Their focus on honor, valor, discipline and tradition stands in stark contrast to the heartless, industrialized forces of progress, epitomized by Gatling guns which mow down swarms of valiant, sword-wielding samurai. Not surprisingly, he ends up joining them in their heroic last stand. (You know it’s about to happen when his clueless ex-C.O. asks him “Why is it that you hate your own people so much?” — too dense to understand that Nathan doesn’t hate his own people, but loves his adoptive people.)

There was a time when I’d have dismissed Samurai as nothing more than anti-American, anti-Western propaganda, and closed my mind to anything valuable in it. Not any more. Now I think it expresses some very healthy sentiments — though I also think it gets some important things wrong (more about that in a moment).

It’s healthy, for one thing, to react against the cult of “progress” that’s forever seeking to bulldoze the past in the name of building the future. Some kinds of “progress” are at best mixed blessings (like when a megastore drives local stores out of business). Other kinds are best described as curses (like when technology makes porn a mouse-click away). Of course, many people simply want to ride The Wave of the Future because it makes them feel they’re on the winning team; they sneer at those who hold out, calling them “backward,” “outdated” or “reactionary.” But virtuous people know those sneers can be medals of honor, and they don’t mind being on what looks like the losing team if fighting “the future” is the honorable thing to do.

It’s also healthy to love traditional ways of life because they’re traditional. We’re built to get attached to familiar people and things — to receive traditions gratefully from our ancestors and to pass them on to our descendants. Not all traditions are good, and none should be exempt from moral scrutiny. But the predisposition to value what our parents and grandparents valued, and to preserve it for our children and grandchildren, is indispensable to any real civilization. We shouldn’t pick our values the way we pick fashions off store shelves, based either on our individual consumer tastes or on our collective slavishness to fashion. The really valuable things in life are almost always inherited.

Thus far, there’s a lot to be said for a movie like The Last Samurai. But it’s got a fatal flaw: In its reaction against modern life, it looks for alternatives in all the wrong places.

While it’s fun to imagine brave samurai standing against all odds, the truth is another matter. National Geographic's Stefan Lovgren describes them as an “elitist and (for two centuries) idle class that spent more time drinking and gambling than cutting down enemies on the battlefield.” Lovgren quotes Harold Bothiro, professor of Japanese history at Harvard, suggesting that the rebellious samurai were fighting mainly to keep their privileged status. I’m no expert on Japan, but odds are these gentlemen are more on target than folks who make movies.

More important, the romanticism extends to religion. Many samurai followed Buddhism or Shintoism. They didn’t just respect their ancestors, they worshipped them; they also worshipped the emperor, whom they saw as a god. You’d think the folly of deifying human beings would be apparent to most non-Christians as well as to Christians, but Samurai treats those beliefs fondly. Nathan leaves no doubt where the movie’s sympathies lie: He voices skepticism about the God his native country worships, but praises the “power” of samurai spirituality.

What’s the source of Eastern religions’ appeal to Westerners? While some people are attracted solely by the religions themselves, I suspect many are first drawn in, to a large extent, by what the religions aren’t: namely, Western.

I’m old enough to remember when Islam first started making its substantial gains among black Americans — a movement driven at least as much by politics as by religion. (Militants were pushing for an alternative to what was seen as “the white man’s religion.”) I’ve seen countless westerns (on TV and in theaters) positively gushing over American Indian spirituality in contrast with bigoted, churchgoing townsfolk. I’ve seen plenty of high-profile celebrities drawn into cults (Cruise, for his part, is into Scientology; Madonna practices Kabbalah, while regularly bashing her Catholic upbringing). And I can’t help but notice the common denominator: an in-your-face rejection of Christianity.

And that’s not just sad, it’s ironic. For despite what many people assume, Christianity isn’t exclusively Western, either in its origins (the Middle East) or in its current practice (a big chunk of the world’s Christians are in Eastern or Third World countries). And if you’re looking for a noble and heroic tradition, Christianity’s got ‘em all beat.

Two thousand years is a long time, and in that span Christians have had plenty of disgraces. Yet as authors Vincent Carroll and David Shifflett argued in their book Christianity on Trial (which I reviewed a couple years back ), the Christian record holds up strikingly well. Christians bore up bravely yet peaceably under persecution, invented hospitals and universities, and introduced previously unheard-of ethical rules into war. (They didn’t always follow the rules, but that was typical of the world: What was remarkable was how often they did.) Christians drove the anti-slavery movements, put their lives on the line to save Jews from the Nazis, and took immense risks far from their homes in order to reach the lost.

That’s a record that doesn’t need romanticizing to be impressive. Kinda makes you want to ask why people besides Mel Gibson don’t make more movies about it.

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