Synopsis
China, the Warring States period. The King of Qin, bent on unifying the country by force, lives in fear of assassins. A nameless man, a minor provincial prefect, arrives at his palace claiming to have killed the three deadliest fighters of the kingdom of Zhao: Sky, Flying Snow and Broken Sword. The King lets him approach and asks him to tell how he defeated each of them.
Why watch it
Hero was Zhang Yimou's first wuxia, the Chinese genre of wandering swordsmen. Coming two years after Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it confirmed Western audiences' appetite for the genre. The story unfolds as a series of competing versions, each with its own dominant colour (red, blue, white, green), in the manner of Rashomon: the King and his visitor contradict each other, and every fight changes meaning depending on who tells it.
An outstanding cast
Jet Li plays Nameless. Donnie Yen plays Sky, and their rain-soaked duel in a gaming house, spear against sword, pits two of Hong Kong cinema's best screen fighters against each other. Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung, the couple from In the Mood for Love, play Broken Sword and Flying Snow, with Zhang Ziyi as their student Moon. The fights were choreographed by Tony Ching Siu-tung, who won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Action Choreography for the film.
Combat as painting
Hero does not aim for realism: fighters fly, run across water and duel among swirling yellow leaves. The lake duel was shot in Jiuzhaigou National Park in Sichuan, and the desert scenes near the border with Kazakhstan. Christopher Doyle's cinematography won the New York Film Critics Circle award. Martial artists will see less technique than an idea of combat: focus, waiting, the single decisive move. The handling of the Chinese straight sword (jian) and the spear is striking, even when wires do part of the work.
A worldwide hit
Made for $31 million, Hero grossed about $177 million worldwide. It topped the Chinese box office in 2002, and in 2004 became the first Chinese-language film to reach number one in the United States, for two weeks running, released under a "Quentin Tarantino Presents" banner. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and holds a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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