Mifune as Macbeth, a total madman tempted by a medieval thirst for power, violence and overreaching ambition. The source is Shakespeare, but Kurosawa viscerally elevates the material beyond Shakespeare. With the badassery of Mifune at the fore, THRONE OF BLOOD becomes a raving, ravishing, visual feast of weathered proportions. There's so much cinematic style and notorious king shit on display that it really feels like the perfect mix of myth, mood and epic blood-school theater. I love how dark and ruthless the production is. The rolling fog, the rain-soaked forest, the castle ruins, the misty battlefields, the coven of birds, and the terrifying journey through shadows, ghosts and infinitely serrated arrows. It's all rendered in such poetic terms, controlled by a witch's spell and summoned by a prophecy that spins wildly out of control. The focus isn't so much a fate or freewill struggle, like the Bard explored. It's more of an existential freefall into power dynamics, succession battles, and the vanity of one man's appetite for ladder-climbing through blood-soaked, superstitious zeal.

The ending, aside from being the most badass thing ever committed to celluloid, carries the perfect cautionary sting. Ambition, unchecked, is a kingdom waiting to be shanked by a million arrows. Hold on tight enough and you'll never dodge its consequences. We're too far removed from Mifune to sympathize with his vainglorious ascent, but we watch his rise and fall like an episode of Game of Thrones, always with enough vision to know what Kurosawa is wanting us to see. In Mifune live the ghosts of ancient warriors, each belonging to a long heritage of violence and longing, treachery and power-struggle. Destined to become a king, maybe, but that's only because he feels he belongs to an oppressed class, and it is only human to build itself up through class distinction before destroying itself by its own narcissism. 

Mifune is repeating the work of his ancestors, like a bedtime story told to history students. A story that goes, "Once upon a time, warlords preyed upon the weak, and the weak thirsted after power, and power gradually transfigured the weak into murderous, treasonable warlords themselves, and so on and so forth." The great cosmic joke? All these mocking ghosts and specters know where his path will lead, as they once followed the same career. Repressed ambition leads to expressed transgression, and onward to fits of rage and killing sprees and one of the best tragedies ever put to screen. All that can be done now is to watch this delirious fiend become yet another ghost of the earth. Doomed for chorus-life for eternity, he'll sing the warning of prophecy to the next generation of power-hungry warriors. Next to RAN, this might be the greatest Shakespeare adaptation I've ever seen.

Kurosawa Ranked