Throne of Blood

To say the least, Throne of Blood was quite interesting. When I first saw the opening credits I thought it would be brutal to endure but to my surprise I was wrong. The one thing that I liked most was the transformation between Scottish to Japanese culture. It seems as though not only did he want to change the setting but he wanted to completely incorporate Japanese tradition. The elaborate costumes resembled Noh theatre, a type of classical Japanese drama. Kurosawa does an outstanding job of changing the wardrobe and the scenery to fit his heritage. I have always been interested in Japanese culture and the costumes really caught my attention. I particularly enjoyed the soldier’s armor and helmets. One thing that I found sort of fascinating was Lady Macbeth being pregnant and losing her baby. It was a different approach, but what I got out of it was foreshadowing to all the other deaths and that any new innocent life brought into their family would be corrupted and would be better off dead. Although he adapted the story, he does keep some of Shakespeare's original methods such as using messengers to imply that a battle has taken place off stage. Another thing that I noticed was how dark and gloomy the scenes were. With the film being black and white the gloominess stood out even more. There was a lot of fog and darkness which definitely adds to the film because of the demonic plot. I liked he kept some of the original but added his own twist to the film.