You will prob. have to give this a second or third watch to get all the names and places and connections ... but then it's a pretty awesome samurai flick.

At first and like many, I freely admit I had trouble following the plot of Masahiro Shinoda's Samurai Spy. Its opaque plot. Its dense exposition scenes. I thought I was just not culturally equipped to tell the various factions (or Japanese names) apart. That's until I read another person's comment that this was essentially Chambara Noir and it came into focus for me. Samurai Spy has a lot more in common with The Maltese Falcon than, say, Seven Samurai. Like that film, there are too many twists, turns, suspects and reveals to truly make sense of things (certainly on a first watch), but one remains interested in the intriguing characters and the crisp black and white cinematography. Understanding what genre it's playing with helps make sense of that ending where our hero - a neutral samurai walking the gray line between two warlike factions (and asking, why war?) - has a "J'accuse!" moment as if he were a 1930s gumshoe. And this is also a Cold War narrative set in Japan's Edo period, which also tends to Noir.