A delight to watch!

This adaptation of James Clavell's Shogun is worth seeing. There are two versions of this: an edited 2 hour version, and the 8-10 hour original mini-series. The setting is medieval Japan in the late 1500s/1600s. Protestant England and the Netherlands are at war with Roman Catholic Spain and Portugal.

The story is basically set in the Age of Discovery, in the mid to late 1500s/early 1600s. There is a Dutch ship, the Erasmus, that is piloted by an English navigator, Blackthorn, played extremely well by Richard Chamberlain. The ship seems to get thrown off course, and encounters many severe storms, while unwittingly finding and traversing the secret Straits of Magellan. Despite a tragic loss of most of those on board, the ship is piloted safely away, and continues westward by northwest. Eventually, due in part to the storms, they reach land, and reach "the Japans", as Blackthorn comments, almost lifeless.

Blackthorn awakes in a completely foreign culture, with customs so different from his that he is at a complete loss as what to do. To his shock and dismay, and utter incomprehension, he has landed in Japan during the time of the samurai, an elite military class based on the concepts of bushido, a strict code of honor, and loyalty. There is one westerner there to greet him, Father Alveta, a Jesuit priest from Spain. He and Blackthorn are total and utter enemies from the start, and the priest is his nemesis throughout the film. The local samurai leader puts him in his place, but Blackthorn is noticed by his superiors, and eventually, by the Lord Torunaga, played by Torisho Mifune(who also starred in the famous "Seven Samurai" film of 1954). Blackthorn is recognized as a potentially valuable ally by Torunaga, who, in the course of the film, makes himself supreme military ruler, or Shogun, of Japan, subordinate only to the emperor. Blackthorn is commanded to learn Japanese, and the Lady Toda, played by Yoko Shimada, is his tutor. Of course, he falls madly in love with her, but there love is forbidden, as she is already married to an able samurai. Their love succeeds, despite all of the odds, but ends in tragedy, as she is killed in an assassination attempt on the Shogun. Blackthorn has another pilot as his friend and enemy, the indomitable Vasco Rodriguez, played by John Rhys-Davies.

This movie has everything, romance, adventure, intrigue, politics, religion, war, and even earthquakes. All in all, it is an excellent film. But do yourself a favor and try to see the original 8 hour mini-series, or read the book, as a preface to the film.