I really enjoyed the bleakness of Kurosawa’s adaptation here, overshadowing even one of the darkest of Shakespearean tragedies. As much as King Lear influenced the plot line, the biographical elements of Akira Kurosawa’s struggles late in his career and the anxiety of mutually ensured destruction from the Cold War added layers to the character of Hidetora. Kurosawa’s graphic depiction of massacre and suicide reaches levels of apocalypse out of Revelation, but Tango (the Earl of Kent of this version) confirms that the gods are powerless and cannot save humanity “from ourselves.” Only the blind man Tsurumaru survives, as Hidetora predicted but saw as himself, “at the edge of a precipice, bereft of his god (after dropping his scroll of the Buddha), in a darkening world.” Although it was a classical story in a medieval setting, I found the allegories highly relevant. Obviously an epic story needs a lot of time and a sprawling narrative, but the color schemes helped me follow the characters and the shifting armies and loyalties.