When a movie or TV show follows a familiar formula, it can be a kneejerk reaction for critics to complain that it’s not doing anything that hasn’t been done a hundred times before. But humans have been telling those familiar, formulaic stories since they were cavemen sitting around a fire, crudely painting narratives on the walls. Those formulas work for a reason, because they touch on something universal. Procedurals about doctors and lawyers and cops all follow the same basic formula, and we all watch them repeat that formula over and over again, because it satisfies something innate within us to see a professional tackle a difficult case, weather all the unexpected challenges that come with it, and ultimately get the job done.
Revenge is one of the most common plots found in movies and TV, because it’s a nice, easy way to get an audience to root for a protagonist. When Charles Bronson’s family is brutalized by a street gang, we want to see him take the law into his own hands. When John Wick’s dog is murdered by a gangster’s arrogant son, we want to see him go scorched-earth on the perpetrators. Our inherent sense of justice keeps us locked into their stories.
We’ve seen straightforward revenge stories, like Death Wish, which celebrate their protagonist’s violent retribution. But we’ve also seen darker, more nuanced revenge stories, like The Last of Us Part II, warning us that if we seek vengeance, we’d better dig two graves. Revenge perpetuates a destructive cycle of violence, and the relentless intensity of Ellie’s rampage to avenge Joel presents that cycle clear as day.
Netflix’s animated masterpiece Blue Eye Samurai doesn’t do anything with the revenge formula that we haven’t seen before. But it is unequivocal proof that formulaic stories can still work if they’re earnest in their storytelling and emotionally engaging in their execution.
Blue Eye Samurai revolves around a lone female warrior who sets out to exact revenge on four men who have wronged her, one of whom is her father. Along the way, she learns that tragic dig-two-graves irony as her quest for revenge begins to cost her dearly. The series touches on very familiar revenge tropes that we’ve seen in Kill Bill and The Punisher and True Grit and Pam Grier’s blaxploitation classics. But, as proven by all those examples, a well-told revenge story can satisfy even if it’s predictable and formulaic.
At this point, every possible story has been told, and all new writers can do is put a fresh twist on the existing ideas. Rocky is a Cinderella story; Terminator is a Frankenstein story. Ideas are cheap; it’s all in the execution. Big and Obsession are both about a juvenile wish that comes true and has unexpected consequences, but they both tell that story in very different ways. We may have seen all the plot points in Blue Eye Samurai before, but we’ve never seen them done like this. We’ve never seen this incredible star-studded voice cast (led by the brilliant Maya Erskine) bring these archetypal characters to life. We’ve never seen this show’s uniquely gorgeous visual style anywhere else.
Netflix has carved out an impressive niche turning these familiar genre stories into transcendent masterpieces. Arcane tells a pretty conventional dystopian story about a war between the peasants in the underworld and the ruling class in the overworld, but it tells that story more poignantly and powerfully than any previous version of it. Blue Eye Samurai is the same; it doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before in dozens of other movies, TV shows, and video games like Ghost of Yotei. But it does do a better version of all those things than 99% of its peers.
