am i alone on this one????

Rating: 5/10 (12 September 2004)

i was a huge fan of crouching tiger hidden dragon, and am a huge fan of many other Japanese sword films. but when watching Hero, i was almost laughing aloud in the theatre. don't get me wrong, the movie was full of stunning cinematic shots that blew me away. it had some great concepts and ideas. and some of the fights were done quite well. but aside from these few things i liked, it was filled with either direction mistakes a 19 year film student wouldn't even let happen, or complete rip offs of hidden dragon.
i could not possibly write out every mistake i caught after one viewing of Hero, but i'll name a few. From crossing the line of action. a guy trapped with a spear on his chest on the ground then 2 quick cuts later he's out of frame safe from danger. Yimou Zhang tying to make a new graceful style of the matrix's famous bullet time(please everybody just leave bullet time alone, and stop doing it). the forbidden city full of monks and soldiers from wall to wall, but in the opening shot you can clearly see there are only 3 rows of monks with blank white space behind them, due to a lazy vfx director thinking no one would notice. now most people might have not caught all these things and frankly to me, a few mistakes here and there will not make or brake it. but this just shows how this Yimou Zhang guy isn't even in the same ball park as ang lee. taking short cuts to save costs, and just denying so many major rules of film making will make the whole movie suffer. going into this movie i thought it was done by ang lee, then afterwards i was told it wasn't just by the same producer of hidden dragon. i felt Hero is another case of some stupid producer trying to make money off the success of another one of his films by hiring a new director getting a new script but keeping the ideas, cinematics, and vision the same. i have never seen this work before and it didn't work here either. i felt this whole movie was full of take offs from ang lee's master piece.
i also felt it was way to over ambitious, every shot was so drawn out and held so long as though he was trying to build a lot of suspense. but the whole movie is a narration and we know who lives or dies next, so there can't be any suspense. if we know there's no one behind the door, it would be dumb to set up a shot to look like we didn;t. i believe a lot of people will come out thinking its a very boring film because of this. the dialogue was alright, but just dragged on to long.
heres a suggestion to all film makers out there. its cool to take the style and ideas of one movie and use it in another, but the next one better be unique in its own ways as well.
i'm giving it a 5.6.