Hero

Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film Hero was truly a masterpiece in the realm of artistry. It was a film that featured incredible cinematography that highlighted the elements of the natural environment through graphic enhancements. It was delicately decorated with intricate costume and fluid combat choreography that seem to flow in movement. Hero is a like a big firework display that dazzled the audience both native and foreign with its elaborate mixture of wuxai martial arts, Chinese traditional culture and high-end Hollywood graphics.

Hero can hardly be categorized as a martial arts film. Although the film did portray an adequate amount of fighting scenes, the audience is repeatedly drawn into the surrounding of the scene through graphic techniques. During the first fighting scene with Long Sky, the viewer is distracted with the element of rain, the movement of droplets, and the sound of it. It’s almost as if the natural elements overpower the fighting scene, leading to viewer to take in the surrounding and appreciated it. This is shown repeatedly in other fight scenes such as the Flying Snow and Moon’s battle, and Nameless and Broken Sword’s battle amidst the river. Overall, this incorporation and presences of the natural elements throughout the film really captures some kind of essence of Chinese traditional culture. It also portrayed cultural arts such as calligraphy, instruments, and Chinese chess.

The plot was somewhat mediocre. It was a very typical storyline of assassins and their mission to eliminate an unfavorable ruler. However, tragically ends with the death and sacrifice of the assassins for peace and unity. The sequence of the narratives proved to be quite complex, fascinating, and unpredictable but yet again confusing at the same time.

Although, some critics have claimed that the film’s plot represent that political situation of modern China, harboring messages of Communist propaganda. This argument was constructed through the analogy that the Nameless’ sacrifice was necessary to ensure the nation’s unity which can be translated to the notion that individual sacrifices must be made for the greater good which clearly reflects Communistic ideology. However, this idea seems a bit far-fetch. The film profoundly focuses more on the artistic cinematography and graphics making the plot seem very minuscule part of the film to even make that standpoint. In addition, its popularity in China and American itself proves that political message, if any, fails to translate on big screen because it is not the film’s selling point.

The diverse production crew without a doubt did a phenomenon job in transforming a wuxai film into an artistic Hollywood blockbuster film. It presented the wuxai film in a different and maybe more advance platform in the Hollywood industry, in comparison to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Hero is a perfect example of integrating Hollywood elements into wuxai films or vice versa for a more global audience. Its mixture of traditional culture embedded in the wuxai genre appeals to the foreign audience, whereas the big and flashing graphics of western films astonishes natives as well. It was a film that was heavy funded and popularized through computer graphics and artistic footage that presented wuxai film with a Hollywood twist that wow-ed the global audience.