Tom Cruise is easily one of the biggest movie stars alive today, and he’s been at it a long while. From Risky Business and Top Gun in the 1980s, to A Few Good Men and Jerry MaGuire in the 1990s, to Minority Report and War of the Worlds in the 2000s, to the Mission: Impossible movies of the 2010s, to the giant success of Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, the guy has never slowed down. Even the lesser movies in his catalog still slap decades later.

One of those lesser known movies, 2003’s The Last Samurai, has suddenly exploded on the streaming charts. Now is the perfect time to revisit this historical epic.

What is The Last Samurai?

Tom goes east

Directed by Edward Zwick, The Last Samurai follows U.S. Army Captain Nathan Algren, a Civil War veteran who’s been traumatized by his role fighting in the American Indian Wars. He takes a job going to Japan to help train an Imperial army being put together to quell a samurai rebellion against the new emperor. The year is 1876, when Japan is in the Meiji Restoration, a movement intended to modernize the country so it could better protect itself against the forces of colonialism. The country was industrializing and shifting from feudalism to capitalism, and not everyone was happy about the changes.

Nathan eventually loses a skirmish with the rebelling samurais and is taken prisoner by their leader, Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu (Ken Watanabe). Over time, Nathan comes to admire the samurais’ culture and sympathize with their cause, even starting up a romance with Lord Katsumoto’s sister Katsumoto Taka (Koyuki). He eventually aids the samurai in their rebellion, and in the end helps convince the inexperienced Emperor Meiji (Shichinosuke Nakamura) to find a way to modernize Japan while still honoring the way of life that the samurai class clings to.

The Last Samurai got solid (if not spectacular) reviews when it opened in movie theaters, with audiences liking it more than critics. Taken at face value, the movie is a sweeping epic with a romantic sensibility and compelling performances from the likes of Cruise and Watanabe. It’s beautifully made and incredibly watchable, even over two decades later.

The controversy of The Last Samurai

Why is it shooting up the charts now?

While more or less everyone agrees that The Last Samurai is a well-made movie, it has come under fire for its use of tropes. In particular, it’s been criticized for being a “white savior” movie, meaning that it’s a Hollywood movie about a different culture that still centers a white western man. Others ding it for having a rose-colored view of the samurai class during this time in history. Japanese society was becoming more egalitarian during the Meiji Restoration; that was a good thing for a lot of people, but it meant that feudal samurai lords were losing their influence. The Last Samurai depicts this cause as noble, but that may not always line up with the historical record.

That said, the movie was very popular in Japan; it actually made more money in Japan than it did in the U.S. To this day, it’s among the top 30 highest-grossing movies in Japanese history. Ken Watanabe credited it with changing Asian representation in Hollywood for the better. “Before The Last Samurai, there was this stereotype of Asian people with glasses, bucked teeth and a camera,” he told The Guardian in 2022. “It was stupid, but after The Last Samurai came out, Hollywood tried to be more authentic when it came to Asian stories.”

The Last Samurai is currently the fifth most watched movie on HBO Max in the U.S., which is excellent for a 23-year-old film. The sudden uptick in popularity could be due to Tom Cruise talking about it in a recent interview. Or it could be because there’s another Tom Cruise star vehicle coming out right around the corner…

Digger is coming

In Tom Cruise we trust

Digger is a new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director behind artistically ambitious movies like 21 Grams, Babel, and Birdman. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon who must save the world from a disaster he had a hand in causing.

Digger does not look like it’s going to be a traditional Tom Cruise crowd pleaser like Top Gun: Maverick or the upcoming Days of Thunder 2, another continuation of one of Cruise’s classic hits. But Cruise is such a bankable name that he may be able to take this quirky black comedy and turn it into a blockbuster.

Cruising

Digger opens in theaters on October 2, 2026. Before that, feel free to peruse streaming services for other Tom Cruise classics. Although it’s dropped out of the top 10 as of this writing, for several days, the 1994 classic Interview With the Vampire — where Cruise plays a hedonistic bloodsucker named Lestat — was one of the most-watched movies on HBO Max. The Last Samurai isn’t the only Tom Cruise movie getting a boost ahead of Digger. The Interview With The Vampire TV show is all well worth watching, for what it’s worth.