Art.

Rating: 10/10 (9 June 2004)

Martial-arts-movies as a genre has forever been plagued by the lack of substance. While no one is going to argue that the classics aren't fun to watch, the truth is that most of them are just flash, with little or no emotion behind the flurry of kicks, sword thrusts and wire-work.
This is not the case with Hero.
In this movie, director Zhang Yimou, together with the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and a stellar cast, has created a modern masterpiece.
Every frame of this movie is art, and it's painfully beautiful. And the fights are brilliantly realized.
The use of different colour-palettes for each of the segments work beautifully well, and adds a dimension, and a level of polish rarely seen in this genre.
But it's not all eye-candy.
Despite the fact that not much time is spent on the story, Yimou manages to give every character just the right amount of time to establish itself. You're never wondering "Why did she/he do that?", nor do you suffer from an over-explanatory narration. You aren't daddied around.
And this is all accented by the brilliant cast. Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Tony Leung, and Jet Li all deliver amazing performances.
This is a movie where everything clicked. The art direction, the cinematography, the choreography, the music and the acting.
Zhang Yimou proved once and for all that martial-arts is just that, art.