Satomi Hakkenden has been called the Star Wars of samurai movies, and it's not hard to see why -- it's terrific fun. It's also one of the most roundly criticized films in its genre, for being an unabashedly pop-culture take on one of the pre-eminent samurai legends in Japanese folklore. Well, says I, there's no crime in that. As someone else once wrote about another movie with no pretensions to do anything other than have a good time, "It may not be Bach, but it is certainly Offenbach."

The story of the Hakkenden, or "Dog Warriors," comes out of Japanese mythology by way of China (there are many examples of Chinese folklore being imported and rewritten, this being one of the most enduring). In it, a young princess, the last of her clan, was endowed with eight spiritually-linked warriors to protect her from various supernatural menaces. The catch, of course, was that none of the warriors knew they had been so selected; each of them recognized the other over time via the presence of special magic beads. Each bead, and thus each warrior, was also linked with a specific Confucian spiritual virtue (a notion this movie doesn't bring out that clearly). The impact of the legend and its subsequently-derived entertainments is hard to over-estimate; almost every Final Fantasy game or anime with a loose-knit group of heroes probably has Hakkenden's mitochondria floating around in its cells.