Beauty as Beauty Does

Rating: Null/10 (29 August 2004)

This film is undoubtedly a visually beautiful film, but it is too much beauty for beauty's sake and the moral of the story is very disturbing to say the least. I wonder whether Zhang Yimou was aiming to get back to the good graces of China's communist government.
Let me explain my first comment. I think the filmmaker tried too hard to get the most beautiful shots, the logic of movement, location and characters suffered. For example, the movement of the fighters was not very clear because Zhang was trying to capture the flying leaves, rain drops, water, reflection on the lake, flowing sleeves etc. I didn't see the sequence of offensive or defensive moves like I could in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. In CTHD, Ang Lee showed beauty through movement itself. Here, Zhang relied on the settings.
In addition, the locations showed in the film had no relation to the ancient kingdom of Zhao, where most of this film centers in. The desert where Flying Snow and Broken Arrow resided looks suspiciously like the western Talimakan desert I just visited several months ago. That was not Chinese territory in the Waring State Period. When Broken Arrow talked about going home with Flying Snow, it's Gaui Lin on the screen and Gaui Lin is as far away from the ancient Zhao as it can be. I can't help thinking Zhang's shooting in the desert was influenced by CTHD. But CTHD's storyline did happen in that region and Hero has no reason to be there.
And in trying so hard to impress the audience with the grand scale of the production and the beauty of the images, the characters got lost. All the main characters are very one dimensional: noble. Being noble is all fine and good. But noble characters with no flaws or human emotions do not connect with the audience, at least not with me. It's more like watching a grand historical pageantry than a movie. The central figure Nameless is especially flat. Yes, I'd take CTHD's cast over this any day. Zhang Zi Yi shined in CTHD, but was reduced to mere an eye candy here. Yet, she showed more raw emotions than anyone else in the film because everybody else was just too darn noble to show any emotion.
Now come down to the moral of the story Zhang conveyed at the end of the film. I know the history of the Waring State Period and assassins during that time. No one has ever told it with the point of view that since uniting China was a worthy goal, individual suffering under the conquest and the following reign of the King of Qin, or the First Emperor of Qin/Chin Dynasty was nothing. All the assassins should die so the conqueror could live to conquer. Wouldn't Hitler agree with this message wholeheartedly? Hey, uniting the world seems to be a worthy goal too. Making the First Emperor of Qin or Chin She Hwang into a sympathetic and heroic figure is really hard to swallow for someone who knows Chinese history.
I give this film 6 out of 10, and the 6 is purely for the visual.