A different angle

Rating: 8/10 (9 May 2007)

I read many comments and even professional critiques of this beautiful movie. The most of them try to compare "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to "Hero".
What a terrible mistake ! As Hero cannot be compared to a classic 70's wu xia pian.
For a simple but too often forgotten reason : These are only rare scenes in the storyline that are showing a neutral point of view.
Most of the scenes are the visual render of what characters are telling, or imagining.
And this is in my opinion the way Mr Zhang has found to admit his lack of technical talent (at this time) in filming wu xia. A modest and original way.
Hero tells stories, with a rare poetry, a real attachment to the detail, that make each part of the intrigue visually unique. This is a kind of experience we all made, reading a book or hearing a story for the first time. Each person imagine the images so far from reality in the facts, depending of his visual, historical, cultural, moral bases.
This is what Mr Zhang show us in this masterpiece, not a eloquent and false part of history in a unique vision, but the expression of what we could imagine, and what he and all the team made real for our eyes to see on screen.
Hope you'll see his movie with that on mind. Enjoy.