Exquisite Chinese Martial Arts Ballet

Rating: 9/10 (16 March 2006)

"Hero" is another one of those Chinese sword-fighting action films, exquisitely designed from the same kind of cloth that was used for the recent Academy Award-winner, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Both films help to define a unique cinematic genre that might be called martial arts ballet.
Like Crouching Tiger, Hero features lush imagery, constant acrobatic sword-play, intriguing special effects, and characters who leap impossibly through the air while they fight. Like Crouching Tiger, Hero uses the structure of having a character tell a narrative, with flashbacks interwoven at different segments of time to illustrate the narrative. Then, another character relates the same salient events from a different point of view, thus rebutting the first character's version while twisting it into a new and exciting dramatic situation. This type of story-telling technique not only provides a flexible and versatile (if somewhat artificial and forced) cinematic structure, but it also conveys the message that nothing is at it seems at first sight: there is always one more way to view a series of events. The truth will come out only if you can obtain the correct perspective on events. At that point, a person's true character will be revealed by the action he takes.
Woven deep within the fabric of the acrobatic sword-play, Hero, like Crouching Tiger, has a poignant love story element, in which the lovers must somehow sacrifice for the greater good. In this case, the meta-message of Hero, which is set in a time of China's distant past, turns out to be that even unnamed heroes possessed with skills that go far beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, must sacrifice for the greater good of a unified China, poetically referred to as "Our Land." The clever way in which this political, ideological theme is interwoven into the love story and the martial arts scenes makes this a very powerful movie for nurturing a sense of nationalistic pride and patriotism among modern Chinese, for it mythologically links them back thousands of years ago to their ancestral past. In a country where ancestor worship is an established religion, this is powerful stuff.
Unlike the rugged individualism and the Ayn Randish self-centeredness that functions as the primal undercurrent in the heroic cinema of the West, movies like Hero spring from a culture in which the primary social value requires that the individual subordinate his egocentric self for the greater good of his family, his community, his nation. While the West seeks to question tradition and to promote individualism within the context of developing an independent or rebellious spirit of mind, in the Orient, it is much more important to be interdependent with those around you, as well as to respect the authority and the values of those who preceded you.
The entire narrative of Hero —and its underlying meta-message— is so seductively cloaked by a magically droning, ethereally haunting sound-track that you are slowly, but surely, hypnotized as you watch the different versions of the story unfold. The overall effect on a viewer's psyche is so subtle that no one would dare call this outright propaganda. But the legends which are being narrated, the new myths which are being created, and the cultural collective unconscious which is being nourished through martial arts ballets like Hero (and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) lead me to believe that these brilliant Chinese filmmakers have raised the art of cinema to an entirely new level of integrating mind, heart, and psyche. Western filmmakers, psychologically savvy statesmen, and open-minded, cross cultural entrepreneurs should take note.