Hero Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)August 30th, 2004
Jonathan Richards
HERO
Directed by Zhang Yimou
PG-13, 96 minutes
PEN AND SWORD
If you're a moviegoer with a soft spot for stirring spectacle, martial arts, sumptuous color, good acting, poetic silence, romance, action, nuance, and history, then your ship has just come in. It has not been an easy voyage. Zhang Yimou's Hero has been inching toward these shores from China with the excruciating slowness of Ulysses making his way back from Troy. Two years ago it earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It is China's all-time box office champ. Most of the rest of the moviegoing world has already seen it, and the DVD has been available here for months now; but Miramax, a company with a tradition of delay when it comes to Asian films, has been taking its own sweet time delivering it to American screens.
Hero is Zhang's (Raise the Red Lantern, The Road Home) first leap into the martial arts genre. He's fashioned an epic that calls to mind elements of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kurosawa's Ran, but with Zhang's own distinctive stamp. The story goes back a couple of millennia, to the third century B.C. China is fragmented among six warring kingdoms. The most powerful of these is Qin, whose King Chin Shi Huang Di (Chen Daoming), a big picture guy, has ambitions to wrestle the separate states together into one encompassing empire, with himself as emperor. The Qin army has the military side of things pretty well in hand; the problem is a handful of deadly assassins who have targeted the king for execution. They are Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung).
The beauty of Zhang's storytelling approach is to begin with the fates of these three assassins already decided. The hero of his tale (Jet Li), a man so disadvantaged in life that he doesn't even have a name, has already bested this dangerous trio in combat, and for his heroics he has been summoned to a one-on-one interview with the king to tell how he did it. With that particular element of suspense thus put aside, we are served notice that this will be about something more complex than winning and losing. It will be a while before we understand what that is.
The story unfolds in the patchwork style of conflicting realities we associate with Kurosawa's 1950 classic Rashomon. The same events are told from different perspectives, telling different versions of the truth. Without going into spoiler detail, the stories involve the motives, loyalties, and ultimate aims of the principals. Ultimately the ambition of Hero is to transcend the subjective specifics of good guy versus bad guy. The focus instead is on the sweep of history, where good guys and bad guys are as interconnected as yin and yang, and you can't tell the players without your own program.
Sometimes the story and the dialogue can run to the simplistic. But you don't need to know, or care, a great deal about Chinese history to get the best of what Hero has to offer. That is found in the visual feast that Zhang and veteran Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle have lavished on the screen. Each sequence has a signature color, and the colors melt into your soul.
Zhang has assembled a great cast of actors, anchored by Jet Li as Nameless. With opponents like Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, and Donnie Yen, and the beautiful Ziyi Zhang as Broken Sword's faithful disciple Moon, there's character as well as skill in the dazzling feats of combat.
The fight scenes are choreographed with hard-hitting precision mixed with dreamlike mysticism. They convey a sense of wholeness and interconnectedness. Zhang understands martial arts as a part of a continuum with other arts, and with nature. When Nameless does battle with Sky, they call in a musician to play for them as they fight, because "martial arts and music share the same principles." A person's technique in calligraphy can offer an insight into his fighting style – the pen and the sword are not in conflict, but all part of the same universal truth. Nature itself bows to the mental and physical mastery of the martial artists, as they leap, float, defy gravity and time, and even walk on water.
There is a danger of all this digitally enhanced gravity-bending reaching the audience saturation point. What electrified us in The Matrix and enchanted us in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon runs the risk of becoming locked in cinematic cliché. But it still comes down to how well it's done. Zhang has admitted to being pretty inexperienced in the shooting of martial arts sequences, so he turned that over to action director Ching Siu-Tung. But Zhang wraps it in his sense of style and pacing and his philosophy of the cultural meaning of wuxia, as Chinese martial arts are called in Mandarin. It is Ching who propels the fighters through the air, but it is Zhang who slices the raindrop neatly in half.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
