Beautiful, elegiac, mythic, reminded me of "Alexander Nevsky"

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2004)

The obvious comparison everyone is going to make will be with "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Like that movie, "Hero" features gorgeous cinematography, fantastic wire-fu wushu action, and a tragic story full of odd and unexpected plot twists. This is a great martial-arts film, even (perhaps especially) if you ignore the political subtext.
But the references I kept seeing (intentional or not) were to Sergei Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky". The beautiful, deadly, machinelike Qin armies are very reminiscent of the Teutonic Knights in Eisenstein's epic -- but this time, there's a twist. More I can't say without uttering a spoiler, but I'd bet money the thousands of extras in this movie were subsidized by the Communist Chinese government as a propaganda maneuver against Taiwanese, Tibetan, and Uighur nationalism. "One under Heaven", indeed.