Hero (2002)

Original title: Ying xiong

Director Zhang Yimou was one of the most successful of the so-called “Fifth Generation” of Chinese film-makers, scoring international art house hits with Red Sorghum (1987), Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and The Story of Qui Ju (1992). In 2002 he took an unexpected turn into wuxia, a genre of epic martial arts film given a new lease of life by the worldwide success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Hero turned out to be even more spectacular and dazzlingly beautiful than Lee’s blockbuster and it would pave the way for Zhang’s subsequent films in the genre House of Flying Daggers (2004), Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) and The Great Wall (2016).

The plot mimics that of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), its basic telling of how the king of Qin (Chen Daoming), later Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, survives an attempt on his life, told three times, each iteration colour-coded. In a world of warring states and supernatural warriors, the king is locked in his vast palace, cut off from all but his most trusted servants after the assassins Long Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) made an attempt on his life that was thwarted only when Sword called off the attack at the last minute. A prefect known only as Nameless (Jet Li) is granted an audience when he presents the assassin’s weapons, claiming to have killed them. He tells the king how he defeated Sky and turned Snow and Sword against each other at their calligraphy school in the Zhao state, manipulating the lovers’ feelings for each other and the besotted apprentice Moon (Zhang Ziyi) to his own ends. But the king suspects that Nameless is lying and tells his visitor what he thinks really happened. The truth lies somewhere between the two and once revealed causes both men to reevaluate their beliefs.

Hero was, at the time, the biggest budgeted film ever made in mainland China and every yuán is right there on the screen. The sheer scale of the film is mind-blowing and it’s as visually ravishing and breath-taking a fantasy spectacle as you could ever hope to see. The quieter moments sing with an emotional intensity that even the excellent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon lacked and the action scenes are everything you’d expect given the talent involved, much of imported from Hong Kong. Established action stars Li, Leung, Cheung, Shang Ziyi and Yen are choreographed by the legendary Ching Siu-tung, a director in his own right (best known for the A Chinese Ghost Story and The Swordsman series) and one of Hong Kong’s most awarded and respected action choreographers. There’s some wire-fu and CGI augmentation which will annoy the purists but Zhang and Ching allow enough room for all of the actors to show off their own athletic talents to spectacular effect.

Jet Li is wonderfully stoic as the duplicitous but ultimately heroic Nameless, audiences left in some doubt as to his loyalties and motivations for most of the film and his scenes with Chen crackle with tension as they try to outmanoeuvre each other, several rows of candles between them flickering in protest at their lies and deceptions. Yen only gets one scene but it’s one of the film’s best, an acrobatic fight with Li in a rain-lashed wieqi courtyard, their struggle punctuated by the manic playing of the traditional Chinese stringed instrument the guqin played by a blind musician.

Zhang and Cheung are both excellent as the rivals for Broken Sword’s affections and their face off, a graceful slow motion duel through and above an autumnal forest as leaves fall around them like rain is another highlight. The always excellent Leung does a lot of the emotional heavy-lifting as the conflicted Broken Sword, determined to free the states of the king’s tyranny but seeing the sense of his attempts to bring peace by uniting them into a single nation. His extraordinary battle with Nameless across the surface of a mirror-like surface of a lake is similar to a similar scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but it does it rather better, Zhang adding a disorientating, almost dream-like quality to the fight.

The other stars of the film are cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Shang originally wanted to use several different photographers throughout the film but the practicalities stymied that idea) and production designers Huo Ting-xiao and Yi Zhen-zhou. Doyle worked closely with Zhang to establish the colour-coding, each version of the story being painted in one primary colour (red, blue and white), a flashback being dressed in green and the framing device primarily in black and darker tones. Huo and Yi sets are cavernous and stunning, beautifully decorated and again perfectly colour coded – as shot near the climax where the king recalls the original attempt on his life and he and Broken Sword duel as huge green sheets billow around them is simply stunning.

Then too there’s the score, a gorgeous mix of pulse-pounding Japanese taiko drums and mournful violin solos, played by Itzhak Perlman and the composer himself, Tan Dun (who had also scored Crouching Tiger), with a song performed by Faye Wong. Crouching Tiger may have won the Oscar, beating Hans Zimmer’s score for Gladiator (2000), but Hero is the more interesting, mixing the traditional sounds of the Ancient Rao Ensemble of the Changsha Museum and the Kodo drum ensemble with the power of the China Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in full flight.

Hero has been interpreted by some commentators, mainly in the west, as a political film, and not particularly a positive one, suggesting that the ending is a vindication for tyranny and authoritarianism. Zhang himself denied any such subtext (though to have admitted to one while living and working in China would have been career suicide) and the interpretation may, in part at least, be due to a misinterpretation of a single word thanks to a misleading set of subtitles for the US release. Sword at one point writes the word “tianxia” in the sand which roughly translates as “all under heaven,” referring to the king’s desire to unite not just the warring states that he would unite as China but the whole world. In the American subtitles it was initially translated as “our land” lending a nationalistic tone to the film that Zhang didn’t really intend. Later subtitles reverted to the Zhang’s intended meaning.

Hero was a massive box office hit both in China and the west where audiences had been eagerly awaiting the next wuxia epic after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had laid the groundwork. Zhang followed it with the equally spectacular House of Flying Daggers and the story of Qin Shi Huang, already told in the films The Emperor’s Shadow (1996) and The Emperor and the Assassin (1999) and the television series Rise of the Great Wall (1986) and Qin Shi Huang (2001) would be told again in the Japanese Kingdom (2019). None are as jaw-droppingly spectacular as Hero.