Hero
by Yimou Zhang
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DVD details
Actor: Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Ziyi ZhangDirector: Yimou Zhang
Brand: LI,JET
Writer: Yimou Zhang
Producer: Philip Lee
Producer: Shoufang Dou
Producer: Weiping Zhang
Producer: William Kong
Writer: Bin Wang
Writer: Feng Li
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Mandarin Chinese (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Dubbed), Unknown; French (Dubbed), Unknown
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-11-30
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Miramax
DVD Reviews of Hero
DVD Review: A Waste Of 99 Minutes Of Life.
Summary: 1 Stars
Scenario and showmanship are good and entertaining, if you can overlook that people walk on water, walls, and fly around. The storyline is schizophrenic and nonsensical. I got frustrated waiting for an end that took too long to come.
SPOILER ALERT:
No sequel here, everybody dies. Some several times.
DVD Review: It was ok
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this because I couldn't find it anywhere else at the time and didn't want to wait to see it. It was alright, nothing to write home about. In hindsight, I guess I could've waited to rent it.DVD Review: The good and the bad
Summary: 3 Stars
The good:
Beautiful cinematography, interesting plot, good acting.
The bad:
This movie is way too stylized. Too much slow motion and special effects. The fight scenes are so scripted they look like ballet, not fights. And the last time I checked, humans can't fly.
If you can totally check your disbelief at the door, you might love this movie. Even though this movie has some major positives, I prefer films that are believable.
DVD Review: Niiiiiice kung-fu flick
Summary: 4 Stars
Great action throughout the movie, and an even better story. Jet gives one of his better performances in this one. The visuals are amazing and the fighting is in incredible. Great movieDVD Review: A profound philosophical story about the relationship between power and violence
Summary: 5 Stars
"Hero" is a visually stunning and philosophically profound parable on the relationship between violence and power. It is one of the very few movies that achieves a remarkable fusion between the philosophical ideas underlying the narrative and the visual language that is used to recreate it before our eyes.
Below I am going to recount the philosophical backbone to the plot in some detail so I would advise those who would like to give themselves the opportunity to unravel the ideas on their own not to read further until they have seen the movie.
It all starts with a king who ruthlessly wages war to conquer neighbouring people. His brutal expansionism breeds hatred and resentment in those that have been subjugated to his rule. Three masters of the sword - Sky, Flying Snow and Broken Sword - unite to kill the tyrant. Their attempts remain unsuccesful. Then they are joined by a fourth master - Nameless - who persuades them to join in a plot combining cunning and force to murder the king.
The first part of the movie is only an introduction to the central point at issue. After his alleged victory over the three plotters, Nameless is invited to the royal palace. He is allowed to come within ten paces of the monarch. Later we will learn that Nameless has been training for 10 years to unfailingly kill from that position. So at that point the king is virtually dead. Nothing can technically stop Nameless to take his life.
The king asks him details about the way he has defeated his opponents. He is not satisfied by the account that Nameless offers him and recognises the deadly intentions of his guest. The King then recounts an alternative version of the sequence of events that has led Nameless to his palace. It is in reply to this version that Nameless introduces the central issue.
It appears that a previous assault on the palace by Flying Snow and Broken Sword was unsuccessful because of the deliberate refusal of Broken Sword to kill the king when he was in the position to do so. Indeed Broken Sword has withdrawn from the plan to murder the King, which is a bone of contention with his partner Flying Snow who is still very much committed to the cause. Broken Sword introduces a dilemma in the story: to kill the king or not to kill the king. We learn that he has transcended that dilemma by a long training in the art of calligraphy.
Central in the movie is the insight that mastery of the sword can be practiced at three levels: the mastery of sword in the hand (allowing you to unfailingly kill your opponent from ten paces), the mastery of sword in the heart (allowing to kill your opponent with bare hands from 100 paces) and the mastery of sword neither in hand nor heart (which transcends the act of direct killing and conflict by a vision of peace and mercy).
Broken Sword is someone who has mastered that highest level. He now sees that sparing the life of the king will at some point lead to a unification of an empire and enduring peace for all. This is a resolution of the dilemma - to kill or not to kill - at a higher level of wisdom. Confronted with Nameless's determination to kill the king, Broken Sword cannot but transfer the dilemma to Nameless. The doubt "to kill or not to kill" indeed settles in Nameless who is still vacillating when he is standing before the king. The latter recognises this and increases the pointedness of the dilemma by offering Nameless his own sword to kill him. Nameless has to resolve the dilemma there and then. Eventually he decides not to kill.
By doing so he transfers the dilemma to the king who now has to decide whether to have his attacker executed or not. He decides to have him killed. That is a very conscious choice. As an individual human being the king has enormous respect for Nameless leap to the highest level of sword mastery (which is why the latter is given the burial of a hero) but as a ruler he has to respect the integrity of the law and the trespasser has to be killed. The law is not able to transcend the dilemma. It is not able to accommodate the everlasting tension between the two horns of the dilemma. That is a deeply philosophical assertion about the nature of institutionalised power and the Law.
There is an interesting corollary to this movie. Flying Snow and Broken Sword embody the two horns of the dilemma: to kill vs not to kill. They are waiting for news from Nameless's mission: a red flag for a successful kill, a yellow flag for a failure. When the yellow flag appears, Flying Snow is enraged. She understands that this can only be because Broken Snow's councel has led Nameless to consciously forsake his mission. Broken Sword tries to persuade Flying Snow of his point of view but he can't bring her to consider the dilemma, let alone to transcend it at the higher level of wisdom he has gained. Reluctantly he fights with Flying Snow. From Broken Sword's vantage point the fight is utterly pointless. It draws him again in a quandary he has left behind him a long time ago. At a certain point he just drops his sword, a split second before Flying Snow will hit him with her sword. That split second embodies the desperate trust of Broken Sword in Flying Snow's ability to recognise and transcend the dilemma. Either she does in that split second or she never will. She fails and she kills him. After his death she decides to kill herself.
Zhang Yimou tells this magnificent foundational myth in the most splendid and virtuosic fashion. The images are poetic, suggestive and precise. Nothing is gratuitous, everything assumes significance. This is great, timeless cinema.
Description of Hero
Master filmmaker Quentin Tarantino presents HERO -- starring martial arts legend Jet Li in a visually stunning martial arts epic where a fearless warrior rises up to defy an empire and unite a nation! With supernatural skill ... and no fear ... a nameless soldier (Jet Li) embarks on a mission of revenge against the fearsome army that massacred his people. Now, to achieve the justice he seeks, he must take on the empire's most ruthless assassins and reach the enemy he has sworn to defeat! Acclaimed by critics and honored with numerous awards, HERO was nominated for both an Oscar? (2002 Best Foreign Language Film)and Golden Globe!Director Zhang Yimou brings the sumptuous visual style of his previous films (Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad) to the high-kicking kung fu genre. A nameless warrior (Jet Li, Romeo Must Die, Once Upon a Time in China) arrives at an emperor's palace with three weapons, each belonging to a famous assassin who had sworn to kill the emperor. As the nameless man spins out his story--and the emperor presents his own interpretation of what might really have happened--each episode is drenched in red, blue, white or another dominant color. Hero combines sweeping cinematography and superb performances from the cream of the Hong Kong cinema (Maggie Cheung, Irma Vep, Comrades: Almost a Love Story; Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, In the Mood for Love, Hard Boiled; and Zhang Ziyi, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The result is stunning, a dazzling action movie with an emotional richness that deepens with every step. --Bret Fetzer
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