The way to approach Ran is not to think of it as a fusty "reworking" of King Lear as a samurai epic, but as a discovery of how much of a sense of epic samurai fatalism there already was in Shakespeare's work. The movie is, indeed, based on King Lear, but it has not been turned into a lockstep product; far too much personal passion and bitterness has been brought to it for it to be a mere reading of the play. It is easily Kurosawa's best film next to The Seven Samurai or Ikiru, far grimmer and more pessimistic than those two movies but no less masterful or compelling.