HERO (China, 2002)
Directed by: Zhang Yimou
Starring: Jet Li! Maggie Cheung! Tony Leung! Zhang Ziyi! Donnie Yen! Chen Dao-ming!

“Zhang Yimou may have dipped his cinematic pen in ‘mere’ genre, but in doing so, he has inscribed a masterpiece.”

- Richard Corliss, TIME

“Doyle's camerawork is sensational, surpassing even his flashiest work for Wong Kar-wai."

- Derek Elley, Variety

Hong Kong Film Awards - 2002

Winner – Best Action Choreography – Ching Siu-tung
Winner — Best Art Direction
Winner – Best Cinematography
Winner – Best Costumes and Make-Up
Winner – Best Music
Winner – Best Sound
Winner – Best Visual Effects

The hero story, where one man resists an overwhelming sea of troubles through force of arms and strength of character, is filmdom’s biggest cliché. In HERO, Zhang Yimou takes a razor sharp sword and skewers it, filming the candy-colored rivers of liquid that pour out. A massive hit throughout Asia, China's 2002 Oscar entry is the most subversive and smartest movie Zhang Yimou has made yet. Bearing some resemblance to Wong Kar-wai’s landmark 1994 martial epic, Ashes of Time, HERO is the first martial arts movie since Ashes to take the genre forward. (There’s a further Wong Kar-wai connection: In the Mood for Love stars, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, both feature in HERO, and Wong Kar-wai’s cinematographer and collaborator, Chris Doyle, shot HERO.)

Set 2,000 years ago, during China's Warring States period, the movie focuses on an attempt to assassinate the King of Qin, China's first emperor, who united the brawling kingdoms through generous applications of shock and awe, and the occasional ethnic cleansing. Jet Li plays a rural constable who has managed to defeat and kill the three deadliest assassins who were gunning for the King and he arrives in Beijing to claim his reward: a royal audience in a giant, empty echo chamber of a hall. The two talk, and the movie pushes off into a delirious maze of mirrors as the conversation twists and turns, and as the truth is unearthed, buried, and exhumed once more for re-examination. Three different versions of what happened are played out in color-coded flashbacks, like a hard candy Rashomon, each centering around a duel shot with shocking stylistic bravura. The action is choreographed by the Balanchine of martial arts, Ching Siu-tung, whose balletic anti-gravity flights of fancy have always been deemed too pretty for the perceived Western need for punishing martial arts mayhem (the specialty of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Yuen Wo-ping).

Lies pile up like dead bodies as storms of arrows darken the skies, and autumnal duels take place in forests obscured by whirlwinds of falling leaves. Driven by Tan Dun’s pounding score, and performances by violinist, Itzhak Perlman, the movie slowly builds to a boil as martial artist Donnie Yen (Blade II), spurned servant, Zhang Ziyi (Rush Hour 2, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, and Jet Li stalk each other in a blur of revenge, murder, high-minded political speeches and homicidal idealism. When the movie ends, vanishing from the screen like slowly dispersing clouds of smoke from a funeral pyre, we still don't know whom the title refers to: is the hero the King of Qin who seeks to unify China by any means necessary, or is it the band of rebels who believe that the King must pay for the blood on his hands?

This movie offers no answers, only questions, a stance that has angered many viewers who decry what they see as Zhang Yimou's endorsement of the “One China” policy. But this film is a political statement the way the Mona Lisa is a cheese sandwich. Philosophical, ethereal and uncertain, this is not a movie that rewards your preconceptions. But if you want to get swept away in a dazzling lava flow of images and ideas, you can't do any better than this molten martial arts tone poem.