What’s even more curious about this situation is the simple fact that Antoine Fuqua already directed a modern retelling of Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven in 2003, and he did take it somewhere new.
His Bruce Willis fronted war film, Tears of the Sun, used tropes and styles that felt ripped straight from Kurosawa’s work, but set them firmly within a wholly contemporary war genre.
That particular film maintained all of the hallmarks of a Seven Samurai story, but in a very specific way it felt more honorable to the source material because it took the action somewhere new and more resonant for a modern viewer.
Instead of a group of gunslingers in a western town, we got a team of highly trained, uniquely skilled Navy SEALs making the decision to defy the chain of command in order to save an African village in a war torn nation.