Beyond images and words

Rating: 8/10 (30 September 2007)

"Hero" was one of the movies I liked from the first minute watching it. Although it has some ideas and characterizations I would generally dislike it has left some deep impressions - in some sense it gives you insight into something hardly reachable by images and words:
Looking at the portrayal of the characters, one could find them superficial and hardly realistic. Most of them are exceedingly over glorified - as the English title already says, they are partly portrayed only as "Hero's", with almost no further dimensions. The story and the events lack any realism at all - one is obviously watching a fairy tale.
And at this point you have to accept all those clichés as the means of any fairy tale - and remember that they serve telling an allegory. Otherwise you will miss the quintessence: This movie gives insight into something beyond images and words, a state of mind you probably can only experience. The state in which everything goes with ease and your actions seem to be guided by an inner flow. And this is what you could probably try to call it today, the state of "flow".
The unspeakably beautiful images serve this and every other aspect of the movie, making it not at last one of the most marvelous fairy tales ever told.
As far as for political dimensions, I for my part haven't noticed them when watching the movie - but of course if you apply the fairy tale's ending on todays china and its people - which I do not find entirely convincing - you will get a horrible message.