You don't have to answer all of these, but pick the few that interest you the most: “Seven Samurai” is set in a very foreign environment – both in terms of place and of historical period. Did you have trouble relating to this film because it was so “foreign”? By the end of the film, did you feel more comfortable with this environment? What did Kurosawa do to help audiences connect better to this film? A writer on Japanese film has said that the great Japanese filmmakers have “the knack of capturing mood and atmosphere, of presenting the environment as an extension of man.” Do you find this is true of Kurosawa in this film? “Seven Samurai” is also very much a war movie. Like most war films it treats the efforts of different types of people, different segments of society, to pull together and fight a common enemy. Another aspect of the war film is that it tends, like most action films, to use weapons symbolically: each kind of weapon has special connotations attached to it, c