"Hero"

It took the slow boat from China, but Zhang Yimou's dazzling martial-arts epic has finally come to American movie theaters. It was well worth the wait.

By Charles Taylor

Aug 27, 2004 | Adventure movies usually go by at much too fast a clip to be described as reveries. By applying that word to Zhang Yimou's martial-arts epic "Hero" -- finally, finally arriving on American screens after a two-year wait -- I don't want to give the impression that the movie is in the static tableaux-style that made Zhang's earlier movies like "Raise the Red Lantern" so lifeless. "Hero" may be more contemplative than visceral but I think you'd have to be dead not to be thrilled by it. It's not too much to say that "Hero" is one of the most ravishing spectacles the movies have given us.

A director who takes on a movie of this scale for his first foray into martial arts is setting himself a daunting task. The incredible speed of the great martial-arts performers requires a director who can keep pace, who can render the lightning-fast moves clear to the audience. There are sequences of one-on-one combat in "Hero" that feel as if they are whizzing by us while still imprinting every movement on our mind's eye. When Zhang and his editors Zhai Ru and Angie Lam intercut a fight between Jet Li and Donnie Yen with shots of rain dropping onto a chessboard, or a musician's hands strumming his instrument (each note counts in Tan Dun's spare score), everything on screen seems to be moving to the same enveloping rhythm. Perhaps more than any other martial-arts movie, "Hero" makes us feel what it means to experience the harmony that the genre's characters are always claiming they seek in their craft.

Zhang isn't afraid to take his time to set up a sequence. In one shot, Li runs in slow motion through raindrops that look as if they are suspended in midair. He can also thrust us into the middle of the sudden chaotic spectacle of Li and Maggie Cheung bursting through windows like whirling dervishes to fend off swarms of deadly arrows sent sailing through the skies by impossibly vast armies.

The tone of "Hero," austere and elegiac, is far removed from the self-parodic derring-do of Western adventure tales from Alexandre Dumas to Douglas Fairbanks and beyond. But the tone is appropriate for a Chinese filmmaker working in the long tradition of the wuxia (the Chinese martial arts genre) tale. And a Western viewer can't help but see the links between a performer like Li and Fairbanks -- even though Li is aided by process shots, they both delight us with the sheer physical improbability of their movements.

The story of "Hero," set in the third century, centers on Nameless (Li), a rural prefect who has been summoned to the palace fortress of the King (Chen Daoming, whose performance has a subdued sly wit) to be honored for defeating the assassins who have been out to kill the monarch for 10 years. What follows are three versions of Nameless' involvement with the assassins, Sky (Yen), Flying Snow (Cheung) and Broken Sword (Tony Leung), and Broken Sword's assistant Moon (Zhang Ziyi). Unlike "Rashomon," to which "Hero" has been compared, there is finally no ambiguity about what happens. The third telling of the story arrives at the truth. What the events mean is another matter.

Next Page: The controversy surrounding the film

• View blog reactions