Kingdom: Return of the Great General (2024)

Kingdom: Return of the Great General arrives as the fourth entry in Shinsuke Sato's adaptation of Yasuhisa Hara's manga, and it dispenses with preamble quickly. A recap, then a war. The Battle of Mayang grinds on, Shin's Hi-Shin Unit is mauled by a warrior who calls himself the War God, and General Ouki rides out to salvage a collapsing line. The cast is entirely Japanese, performing figures from ancient China with the serene confidence of an industry that has done this for decades. Nobody involved appears to have mistaken the exercise for a statement about anything. It is a war film about war.

The women of the piece do carry swords. Kyoukai fights Hoken to a standstill longer than any man manages. Ten serves as a strategist in the Qin command post, trading observations with the enemy's aide. Yotanwa arrives at the palace bearing grim intelligence. And General Kyou, one of Qin's Six Great Generals, is revealed in a quiet flashback to have been a woman, and Ouki's intended. That is a notable volume of female competence for a genre that rarely bothers. Yet the film never pauses to congratulate itself. Kyou's gender surfaces as a plot turn, not a sermon, and the women are permitted to be warriors first. The result is a mild current of progressive sensibility that never announces itself.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no climate anxiety, no indictment of capital, no discourse on bodies or brains, no racial reckoning, no revisionist reading of the Warring States period. The film's moral universe is older and simpler: loyalty, sacrifice, the debt a soldier owes the dead. When Ouki dies, he dies on horseback, handing down his glaive and a few plain instructions about learning war from war itself. No lesson is extracted for our benefit. It is a film that trusts its carnage to speak. We are left with the rare pleasure of a blockbuster that has nothing to teach us, and no apparent wish to try.