It's a beautiful movie.

Rating: 10/10 (13 August 2004)

What people who aren't Chinese and who don't know much about Chinese culture fail to understand, is that the warrior mythology portrayed in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero has its roots in a particular genre of fiction that has been around much longer than television or film.
Having grown up reading a bunch of these stories of epic fantasy, I remember being surprised when I went to watch CTHD in the theaters, and saw the audience break out in laughter at the flying stunts. I suppose the concept probably does seem ridiculous to foreigners.
The whole deal with the flying is this:
In the stories, the world of "Giang Hu" mentioned in CTHD is the unconventional part of society in which the characters that practice high transcendent martial arts exist. "Giang Hu" literally translates to something like "lakes and rivers", which kind of is a cultural allusion to the fact that most of these people wander a whole lot participating in great duels of swordsmanship and all kinds of tragic drama.
One of the forms of transcendent martial arts is "chin guon", which translates to something like "the art of lightness". It's a skill that these warrior folk develop from a young age using various methods that make it so they can move as if they were light as a feather. I think the idea is that they're trained so that they progressively have less and less of a perception of their own weight, and thus they can run up walls and fly across rooftops in style. If you don't understand, well, too bad.
I find Chinese warrior mythology pretty interesting, and the problem is that these novels do not translate well. I'm not sure if anyone has ever tried. A lot of what goes on in them has a lot of cultural relevance and wouldn't be readily understood by certain people who have Western sensibilities. Hong Kong and Taiwan have for a couple of decades produced a lot of television shows that portray these stories, but they're mostly pretty cheesy like American soap operas. Which is why I find a film like Hero refreshing. Everything about the film's cinematography tells the story as as a fable, a fairy tale, a good myth where the characteristics that make the hero aren't so easily defined.
I might as well also say that I enjoyed it far more than I did CTHD, since everyone else is comparing this film to that one.