Although I am not a native speaker of Japanese, I have been told that originally there was no word for privacy in Japan. In a country with walls that might literally be made of little more than paper, it is hard to get real privacy, so to a large extent, privacy is a mental state.
You can't feel the claustrophobia of the mountainous island nation of Japan in this movie. Some of the scenes, perhaps filmed in Budapest, make the castle look vast and Japan filled with long, flat plains. Further, geography is all mixed up. The warriors travel easily from the Tokyo area to Deshima, the Dutch colony in the bay of Nagasaki, where Keanu Reeve's character is fighting monsters. Yet in reality that's a journey that would require 205 hours on foot according to Google maps (or 8 hours by public transit).
You get a sense of geographic confusion when you see the castle of the evil Lord Kira is shown as being in a dark and cold place and yet other scenes are in a bright place with cherry blossoms blooming. Cherry blossoms generally bloom in April and not for long. The winters in Tokyo are generally bright and dry. Instead of studying geography, the writers seemed to have fallen back on emotional scenic design. Dark and cold means evil. That didn't work for me in the 2013 "The Wolverine" when the action could have taken place in the distant north and it doesn't work for me here during the Tokugawa period where the fastest mode of transport is a horse.
Turning the story of the 47 Ronin into a white-man-saves-the-day spectacle is cultural imperialism and in this day and age, that might have been a bad judgment call. The need to insert Keanu Reeves as a half-breed reminds me of Raymond Burr in the 1956 "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" Is a white man—or in this case a half-white man as in the 1972-1975 "Kung Fu" TV series—really necessary after the success of Ang Lee's 2000 wuxia film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" or his 2012 "Life of Pi"?
While the dragon in Ang Lee's movie wasn't real or even CGI, the dragon in "47 Ronin" is not Asian. Dragons are considered lucky in China and Japan, but the evil enchantress becomes a dragon in the "47 Ronin." Dragons are associated with wind and water in Asia, but this CGI dragon is one that breathes fire. The script does incorporate Japanese legendary characters: the tengu who are mountain warriors and the fox who can transform itself into a beautiful woman, but brings in one unnamed beast instead of incorporating the kirin or the kappa. And why bring in that nameless beast for one appearance?
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmn5miYrOtwc2gZJynoqeytLzOp5uepqSofLC6jG1uZqqfo7av