The most interesting aspect of Shinoda's retelling is that it was made in the period following the signing of the Ampo treaty, when the political climate was decidedly unresolved with regards to the exact nature of the Japanese constitution and the direction in which the nation was heading. The situation of this power struggle between the established order, the insurrectionary forces, and the foreign powers during the 1960s was thus analogous to the events from 100 years before depicted in the film. What Assassin manifests is the distinct feeling of uncertainty felt by Shinoda's generation who grew up in the immediate post-war period. Rather than flawless archetypes of good guys and bad guys, its historical characters are portrayed in muddy shades of grey with all their human foibles, and the narrative is fragmented through the use of flashback and third-person accounts of the written incidents that lead to its denouement. The film is thus better interpreted as a character study than revisionist history. -- Jasper Sharp