From Rollerball and The Running Man to modern takes like Saw and Ready or Not, the “deadly game” subgenre has been popular for decades. The tropes of these stories have found particular success in franchises like The Hunger Games and Squid Game, but you can only replicate a formula so many times before even the best stories feel boring. Thankfully, Netflix just dropped a new take on the story, and it’s pushing the genre into the future by taking it over a century into the past.
Last Samurai Standing is a Japanese action series based on the novel by Shogo Imamura. But unlike The Hunger Games or Netflix’s recent Uglies movie, this isn’t an adaptation of a glitzy young adult series, but historical fiction set in the late 19th century.
