A visual feast

Rating: 9/10 (3 October 2004)

Perhaps the most visually beautiful movie of the year. This epic tale of moral dilemmas, heroism and the legendary and supernaturally gifted swordsmen of the warring states before the unification of China, leaves you gasping with the sheer audacity of the artistry. The only real connection with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which I'm afraid I personally found a little tedious) is the use of stunning imagery and landscapes to make, I suppose, what was traditionally a male-dominated film market - boys doing battle - appeal to women as well. But the similarity stops there - Hero is about moral paradoxes, self-sacrifice, difficult questions of leadership - but all handled in a sublime panorama of visual extravagance. A nameless official challenges the evil ruler. His skill in swordsmanship has been aided by the study of human relations, of calligraphy, of numerous other arts. We travel across China - the Viet-nam-like tropics with strange mountains, barren plains, breathtaking mountains, colossal palaces. The characters dress in a way that gives further clues as we see the story from different sides - green, yellow and red all having different symbolism. The one jarring factor is the dubious political message which smacks of justification for totalitarianism - with not only a wink to modern China but also to the United States and its expansionist foreign policy and the sort of justifications that Bush type administrations use. The film has possibly meddled with history in terms of the main characters and their actual moral fibre or real motives. In what has become a legendary injustice, the Disney/Miramax empire did not released Hero in the USA until February 2004 - fourteen months after it was released in Hong Kong, and a full year after it received an Academy Award and Golden Globe Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film of 2002 (a fact not highlighted in the promotional trailers and posters very much).