A Beautiful Tale of How A Legend is Born

Rating: Null/10 (6 September 2004)

"Hero" is a visual delight, not the chop socky film it is being promoted as; this is much more a date movie than a guy's action flick.
The comparisons to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" are inevitable, both for the relationships and the soaring around fighting. But "Hero" doesn't even try to be as realistic when they jump to challenge gravity, because this is a tale of story-telling, like "Big Fish." It's about how legends are created, as the myth is created right before our eyes, until even the teller begins to believe what he's relating.
Actions, let alone long, smoldering glances, mean very different things in every re-telling of the story (with each re-telling indicated in a different brilliant color and ever more breathtaking locale). The cinematographer is the Australian Christopher Doyle who also did the equally gorgeous but very opposite in scale Thai film "Last Life in the Universe (Ruang rak noi nid mahasan)" that shares shifts in its storytelling with absolutely delightful and enthralling magic realism twists. The beauty is even more luscious than a fabulously breathtaking film that was also nommed for foreign language Oscar, the Korean "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom)" that was also fable like, but with no martial arts and small scale.
The ads mostly emphasize Jet Li as the star but the movie is taken over by the other absolutely magnetic and romantic male lead Tony Leung Chiu Wai and the two women (the older Maggie Cheung and the younger Ziyi Zhang, both fabulously beautiful).
Sure there's a political angle of favoring uniting warring Chinese states into one empire, but one could say the same about movies about Napoleon or probably most of the samurai movies, let alone "The Last Samurai." Heck, wasn't Britain trying to rule the world in "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" among other imperialistic period flicks?
Media reviews have noted that the subtitles are quite different in the current release compared to the import DVD releases. I would think the music is too as now Itzhak Perlman does the fiddling -- and be sure to stay through the end of the credits to hear the full effect of the thrillingly percussive music.