This film has a remarkably beautiful and surprising soundtrack. Much of the music is provided by Itzhak Perlman on the violin. Just as beautiful is the cinematography. Almost every scene is breathtakingly gorgeous, making the whole movie a banquet of eye-candy. All of the heroes are beautiful people--nobody in the movie is ugly. Of course. Heroes are supposed to be beautiful.

There are lots of inventive special effects here, but they do no overwhelm the story, which is truly character- and story-driven. The preview trailers gave the impression that this film was a knock-off of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but it is not. If Zhang borrows from any previous filmmaker, it is the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa. The battle scenes are astonishing and owe their visual impact and scope to Kurosawa, particularly his later film Ran (“chaos”). But Zhang also repeats and amplifies much of his own work in films such as Red Sorghum. This movie does not have the same heart as Not One Less or The Way Home (My Father, My Mother), but it will make you think about the pathos of how things work out in politics and life.

Not all viewers share my enthusiasm for this film. Most Chinese friends tell me they think it is boring. One perceptive friend from Beijing, with whom I have watched every movie Zhang Yimou has ever made, says that Zhang’s movies always appeal more to foreigners than to Chinese. So I am not surprised when my foreign friends almost uniformly say they liked it.
Some people have theorized that this movie is a hidden message about communism: All insurrectionists are warned, You cannot kill the king. Maybe, but if so, the choice of Qin Shihuang as the metaphorical “king” is odd. He was a vicious ruler, to be sure, but his kingdom lasted only a few years. His goal was the unity of China in the midst of the chaos of the warring states. The name Qin is the root of the English word China. It is to Zhang’s credit that this character is not flat but three-dimensional and sympathetic. If you want to see a movie that openly laments the communization of Hong Kong, see Golden Chicken.

I have only one major complaint about HERO and that is its use of a quasi-classical Chinese dialogue for all the characters. American “period” movies about ancient times (Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Indians) often use this device in an attempt to create “authenticity.” Sometimes script writers attempt a sort of “Shakespearean” English for heightened effect or literacy. For me, it doesn’t work. It just sounds funny and pretentious. The Chinese friend with whom I watched the movie said he had to read the Chinese subtitles to make out the meaning. I think movie characters should always speak the “language of men,” i.e., the modern vernacular. We all know we’re watching a movie, that is, a picture novel, fiction. We can easily suspend disbelief even if the characters in an ancient story speak OUR modern language.