The Magnificent Seven

Antoine Fuqua’s 2016 film inherits from two generations back: it remakes the 1960 western, itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). The threat has changed, though. In 1960 Calvera’s bandit gang raided a poor village for food and supplies, coming back at intervals; here an industrialist takes the valley for its gold, once, and keeps it. The fight is over title rather than harvest. The second difference is casting. Fuqua built the seven from deliberately mixed backgrounds, saying that in his research people came from everywhere, all over the world, and refused to label them: if we never make an issue of it ourselves, the audience brings whatever it brings. He cast Lee Byung-hun after watching A Bittersweet Life. It is Denzel Washington’s first western. The shoot ran 92 days in the summer of 2015, mostly north of Baton Rouge. The score is James Horner’s last; after his death in 2015 his friend Simon Franglen finished it, and Elmer Bernstein’s 1960 theme was folded in. It opened the Toronto film festival. A good fit if you want to see what keeping the 1960 skeleton but swapping raiders for a landowner changes. Not for you if you want the whole score to be Elmer Bernstein’s 1960 march, since the body is Horner’s and the theme only folded in.