wow wow wow wow wow

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2006)

Hero is a movie of wow moments. In fact, the movie seems to have been designed with the goal of making the viewer go "wow" about once a minute. Much of this is achieved through the film's amazing visuals. While ostensibly a martial arts movie, this is really closer to a dance film, with whirling, colorful principals leaping and soaring in impossible ways. The movie is cinematic in a way few movies are, and is basically the movie I was expecting to see after hearing about the disappointing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The film shows the sort of mastery of pure cinematic film making of someone like Kubrick or Kurosawa, although the style is dissimilar to both. The director has an unerring feel for both pure visual composition and for the beauty of movement.
Wow moments come both from stunning sights like a woman spinning so quickly that arrows are pushed away and cool ideas like two opponents facing each other as they quietly imagine the fight they will have as a musician plays. The movie elicits a pure visceral wonder, the sort that makes people shout out, "Awesome dude, that is way cool!" There's not much actual story and the film certainly never pulls you in the way Roshomon does (a film some have compared with Hero, although it's a very superficial similarity). But the film is so stunning from one moment to the next that I really don't care about any deficiencies of plot. This is a work of art and a piece of entertainment that has rarely been matched.