Reviewed by: Kris

Directed by: Zhang Yimou

Produced by: Zhang Yimou, Bill Kong, & Bill Kong

Cast: Jet Li, Ziyi Zhang, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Donnie Yen, & Maggie Cheung

Released: August 27, 2004

Action/Adventure 1 hr. 36 min. In a distant war torn land, a ruthless emperor is rising to power with an iron fist and his massive armies. To control everything, he will stop at nothing. International action star Jet Li is a fearless warrior with no name on a mission of revenge for the massacre of his people.

If you’ve seen trailers or any type of preview for the movie Hero, I’m sure you’ve heard Quentin Tarantino’s name mentioned somewhere in that preview. Basically, Tarantino had no affiliation with this film until he saw it while in China. After he saw this film, he thought it would be something that needed to come over to the United States so it could have an even wider audience. So while Tarantino is the one who was able to get it released over here, he has nothing to do in the making or production of this film whatsoever. Just thought I would get that out of the way because I’m fairly certain people go into this film thinking it will be like Kill Bill since Tarantino’s name is mentioned in the previews. With that said, I love this film. I think it is one of the best films to be released this year, and I think I can say that it’s in my top ten of the year.

Hero takes place about two thousand years ago before China was unified into one country, and it was divided into seven kingdoms. Jet Li’s character goes to the king of one of the kingdoms and tells the king that he has killed the three assassins that are out to assassinate the king. Most of the story is told in flashbacks of some sort. There are some interesting twists along the way, none of which I will go into because it would ruin the entire story for you if I told you much more. Li’s character tells of the way he killed these other assassins, and he did it to help this particular king because he is seen as the most powerful. However, there are underlying events that the audience doesn’t know about until near the end of the film, and I’ll just say that these little twists make the entire film.

This film is the most visually stunning I have seen in a long time. There is so much use of color in this film, and in each flashback or segment of plot the color changes. We get black and white, vibrant blues, lively reds and pinks. I was able to find out what the colors mean in the film: red is passion, blue is love, green in youth, white is truth, and black is death. Now that I know what the colors stand for in the film, it makes much more sense why the specific colors were chosen for the sequences they were in. It also makes the film that much more beautiful.

I have actually heard someone say that this film is Communist propaganda. What really irks me about this statement is the fact that the person got this theory from one or two lines in the film, and that isn’t what the film is about at all. The underlying theme is unity, not Communism. And most people don’t even come out of the film thinking anything other than it’s beautiful. This is a movie that, at surface level, is amazing; but it is amazing when you look beneath the surface. I thought the movie was beautiful because it still relates to what’s going on in the world at large today, and I didn’t see anything Communistic about it.