Released two years ago in China, and a hot commodity on the bootleg DVD market ever since, Hero, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is the kind of lush, serious, historical martial arts film that can attract a mainstream audience not usually interested in violent battles and macho posturing. It's breathtakingly beautiful in its cinematography, costumes and set design, and the fight scenes are exhilarating while at the same time approaching the kind of balletic grace that so enthralled Western audiences in Crouching Tiger.
Director and co-writer Zhang Yimou is best known for dramas like To Live and Raise the Red Lantern, so like Ang Lee before him, he brings a distinct art house sensibility to the martial arts genre. Although the cut being shown in America is a bit shorter than what was shown in China, it still features many quiet moments and plenty of drama. Like the action, though, the drama is over the top and broadly played, and the film's ultimate message—seen by some critics as Chinese nationalist propaganda—is hammered home.
Whatever your feelings on the film's theme, though, there's almost no way to avoid enjoying it on a purely cinematic level. Zhang pulls in many of the big guns of Chinese cinema, starting with Jet Li as the titular hero. Known only as Nameless, Li's character begins the movie having disposed of three legendary assassins who have plagued the king of Qin (Daoming Chen). The king is ruthless in his quest to unite the six kingdoms that will ultimately comprise the nation of China (he will become its first emperor), but the three assassins—Sky (Donnie Yen), Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Broken Sword (Tony Leung)—are opposed to the slaughter and brute force used to conquer the other kingdoms.
The film is constructed primarily with flashbacks, as Nameless tells of how he vanquished the assassins. But, as holes begin to appear in his story, we gain a different conception of who he and the other assassins are, and of their intents, by the end of the film. Despite the twists, the story is laid out in a straightforward fashion, with Zhang putting more focus on the lyrical fight scenes and philosophical musings than on plot mechanics. Almost every combination of the main characters, including Crouching Tiger beauty Zhang Ziyi as Broken Sword's apprentice, gets a matchup, and Zhang is able to keep the action fresh, even when we see the same two characters fight again.
Much of that freshness is thanks to the visuals by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who shoots the Chinese landscapes and interiors in a way that gives everything a sense of the otherworldly, even if the story is based in history. Each flashback has its own color scheme, and costume designer Emi Wada and the entire art department help ensure that nearly every frame looks like its own individually composed painting. In this way, Hero is even more sumptuous than a film like Crouching Tiger, an aesthetic pleasure for its own sake, and you likely will not see a more beautiful film in theaters this year.
As is often the case in films like this, though, everything is so stylized that it becomes difficult to view the characters as people, and Zhang's portrayal of the love between Snow and Broken Sword is too caught up in honor, swordplay and artfully placed drapes to really resonate. Likewise, the ultimate message, meant no doubt to be inspiring and uplifting, strikes a bit of a sour note, especially with a Western audience raised on individualism. Exhorting the collective over the individual and justifying brutal force in the service of empire and nation-building, Zhang's film could be seen as a glorification of totalitarianism, although it presents itself as a tribute to the ideal of individual sacrifice for the greater good.
Strangely, the film gets away with its jingoistic message by sugarcoating it—not something you'd expect from a martial arts movie. But while the lyricism of the fights makes them look stunning, it also distances them from reality. Hero is an incredibly violent movie that features virtually no blood. So when one of the characters talks about sacrificing life for the concept of a unified land, you think of it as a pretty sacrifice, with a single tear and some cool art direction.
Those implications aside, it's a beautiful film, and in spite of people who want to view it as an example of a martial arts movie with depth, it's actually best appreciated on the surface.