Hero is one of the great films by one of the world’s most brilliant image-makers in Zhang Yimou, shot by one of the world’s most attuned and adaptive cinematographers in Christopher Doyle, and stars more than a smattering of the most (justly) recognizable faces in Chinese cinema with Jet Li and Tony Leung leading the way along with the always welcome likes of Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, and Donnie Yen. Such top-tier, artistry-reinforced collaborations are so rare in cinema, with the incredible exceptions of shared creative successes like Steven Spielberg and John Williams, Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, or Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, that the rare instances that do make it to production must be cherished and celebrated. The sum of Hero’s collaborative artistry asserts itself as one of the most winsome and graceful moving pictures of the 21st century. Hero is a film worth celebrating.
The picture begins with a bold meta-observation relating martial arts to the other arts, an observation that sounds cornier than it comes off on screen and in itself is something of an self-apologetic recognition of Zhang’s transition from small-scale dramas into genre filmmaking. “This too is art,” he all but whispers with the artistic claims of his first wuxia. Nameless (Jet Li) has mastered fighting, defeating many of the fiercest and most (in)famous martial arts masters in Qin, all who have attempted to assassinate the King of Qin (Chen Daoming). Subsequently, Nameless earns himself an audience with said king. Framed loosely through the structure of a storybook — at least, it starts this way — with the Nameless fighter recalling his exploits to the king, the first episode begins the relationship between other arts, in this case music, and martial arts. Superstar Donnie Yen plays the spearman Long Sky in a role that slightly precedes the worldwide fame he would find through Ip Man, and, contrary to the actor’s fame, no time is wasted in killing off the character at the hand of the realm’s newest fighting master; the exploits are recounted while the classical tunes of an elderly blind musician set the mood. The brilliant fight choreography (which almost cost the real Donnie Yen an eye), set in Shakespearean rain with the king’s guards as witnesses, is undeniably the film’s best. Each blow hurts; every swing only inches from honest danger. The early and unmatched success of this inaugural fight is perhaps one of the film’s most palpable shortcomings, though it’s by no means a deal-breaker — after all, Hero is much more than the sum of its action pieces.
This sequence is also just one of many threads tethering martial arts to the other arts. A much more elaborate connection manifests in the second episode, through the presence of Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), Broken Sword (Tony Leung), and calligraphy. Zhang certainly believes in martial artistry, and his career, including the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, testifies to this. And yet, none of that is necessary to engage with Hero — the images speak clearly. Like spiders gliding across their webs, combatants dance around one another with verve and grace first, and only then does belligerence follow. They often look at each other more like lovers in a sweaty romance than the rivals of a Chang Cheh film (who, it should be noted, never shied away from homoeroticism). The connection, which may or may not be present in earlier tellings of the Chinese etiological myth, works excellently on screen. Italian silent-era film critic Ricciotto Canudo appears to have been the first to announce cinema as the “seventh art,” an implicit admission of its synthesis of the other arts. The introduction of sound (and thus, synchronous and original music) made this irreversible. Unlike literature, which can only ever exist as one medium, or music, painting, or any of the other older artistic traditions, narrative film requires the others. Nearly every key production position translates artistic abilities from other mediums into moving pictures. The connection to the other arts gains a meta-reading that doesn’t and can’t exist in just writing. Interpreted by the watchful eye of Zhang in his first earnest action picture after decades of social dramas like Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Red Sorghum (1988), the connection sings in an apologetic tone for the action genre — a defensive declaration that this is not that different from that — in addition to the more confident declarative interpretation of cinema’s triumph of the arts. In other words, Hero is a movie about movie making — at least, it can reasonably be read that way. (The “secret” collaboration revealed around the midpoint adds another element to this interpretation.) If we accept that premise, then, we are also to understand that Zhang approaches the movie-about-movie-making from an entirely new perspective, which is no small thing.
Now, for the controversy. There are those who gripe that Hero is a transition in Zhang’s career, not just from drama to action, but from a critic of the state to its chief apologist, and the debate of its heroism is right at the center of this discourse. As film professor Guan-Soon Khoo argues in Offscreen, “Hero has no genuine hero!” The king is a tyrant that Nameless (and Broken Sword) comes to tolerate for tiānxià (天下), or “Our land” as it is translated in the English-language release. This word, at the heart of why Nameless chooses to spare the king, might also be translated decidedly less-nationalistically as “All under heaven,” as In Review Online writer Sean Gilman argues at The End of Cinema. While admitting there is still a flavor of historical nationalism in the use of the word — one that posits China and the Chinese emperor as the authority of the world — a taxing choice in lieu of contemporary geopolitics, “this conflation of tianxia with the Chinese state (of whatever era) is only nominal: because of the traditional equation of “China” with “civilization,” one can just as easily read Sword’s argument as in favor of robust and active pacifism in confronting the forces of violence in the world.” At the end of the day, Nameless chooses to spare the king that he has thought a tyrant for a grand cause related to the destiny of the Chinese empire — and that denial of the valorization of resistance in favor of an emotionally-induced pardon of a powerful and abusive man cannot be fully justified as anything beyond nationalistic either.
At least, it cannot be fully exonerated through a strictly historical understanding. Nameless’s decisive action writes a different story as an illustration of action heroism. The choice of both non-violence and a vision of redemption for the king stand somewhat isolated in the tradition of the genre (though slightly less so in the wuxia). The king’s own words, at Nameless’s swordpoint, put the moment in context of cinematic violence:
“I have just come to a realization. This scroll by Broken Sword contains no secrets of his swordsmanship. What this reveals is his highest ideal. In the first stage, man and sword become interchangeable. Here, even a blade of grass can be used as a lethal weapon. In the next stage, the sword resides not in the hand but in the heart. Even without a weapon, the warrior can slay his enemy from a hundred paces. But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether… the desire to kill no longer exists.”
Besides, the final 20 minutes are simply staggering to take in. Action heroes like Nameless — those who become heroic not through their battlefield exploits but by denying themselves of the same bloodshed — are just as rare as films this consistently beautiful.
On that note, any flaws one finds with Hero cannot be said to be formal shortcomings. Doyle’s overwhelming use of one color per setting lends Hero a singularly unforgettable look. Some of the CGI looks imported from a PS2 game at times, but that’s okay because in execution it’s more charming than distracting. The balletic choreography adds a charismatic flourish to the wuxia tropesm and the big (and original) score from Tan Dun reminds us of a bygone era of movie-going where filmmakers weren’t afraid of the opera house. Even the film’s romance, defined by its use of closeups, perfectly fits its function and builds off Zhang’s previous life as a drama director. These frequent closeups have the addition effect of highlighting the human cost of all the astonishing swordplay. And one of the all-time great action moments in Chinese film history comes at Hero‘s climax, when a mass of arrows blot out Nameless; his decision to spare the king comes with immediate repercussions, and, as is so often the case with the characters of Jet Li, he does not run from the consequences. Instead, he stands honorably and allows the arrows wipe him from existence, knowing full well that China, and, in his understanding of the geopolitical order, the entire world, will begin a new course. If one can lend Hero one-tenth of the grace that its cinematography returns tenfold, he does not die in historical vanity but in mythological valor.
