You Can Be My Hero Baby

I rented Hero on DVD this weekend, putting me only a couple of years behind the rest of the know universe. I went in worried that it might simply be a Crouching Tiger remix, and I actually felt that way for much of the beginning of the movie. There were several things I would have thought might have been better to have changed in order to give a little more distance. Many of the similarities could not be helped, but having Tan Dun score this movie, especially with an almost identical sounding score, only served to make it seem like an attempt to recapture the phenomenon of CTHD. A second odd choice was the casting of Zhang Ziyi. I'm sure she's a wonderful actress (I refuse to pass any judgment on the acting abilities of anyone speaking a language I don't understand. Too much is lost in the way things are said for me to make a determination based on subtitles that someone is a wonderful or horrible actor.), and there can be no doubt that she does well in performing martial arts roles, but I can't imagine that she is the only one who could have filled this part (then Zhang Yimou cast her in another similar movie, The House of Flying Daggers). Then of course is the issue of the Wuxia genre. I understand the flying or gravity-defying leaping, as the case may be, but after it has been used and copied in several movies it is no longer novel and becomes more distracting. Ok, that's the end of my griping about the movie; let's get to what was good.

It was gorgeous; everything about the look, from the sets to the scenery to the costumes to the movements of the actors was wonderful. As the story is told in a series of Rashomon style flashbacks, key backgrounds and clothing change in color from red to blue to white and our understanding grows. It's hard to get into the story without giving away too much. The movie tells of the unification of China and how several of the characters had to learn that sometimes the wants, desires or sufferings of one person are unimportant when compared to a greater good.

The Verdict: Recommended to those who are not too disturbed by wire-fu, not against subtitles and not of the opinion that a movie made in China about sacrifice for one's country must be communist propaganda.

Until later...