« Review : Jakks TV Game Atari 2600 Paddle | Main | Review : The Legend of Zelda : The Minish Cap for Gameboy Advance »
Review : Hero on DVD
Last week I saw the movie Hero for the first time when I got the DVD. It is a well made flying swordsman movie.
Flying swordsman movies are a special genera of Chinese action movies where being cool lets kick ass martial artist defy the laws of gravity and time with their pure powerful kick ass powers. If I have learned anything historically about mid-evil China it is that gravity was not as strong as it is now and that time can slow way the hell down when you are about to kill a whole bunch of helpless henchmen.
Hero is a well made Wire-Fu movie that was financed by Miramax and combines stunning sets, cinematography, costumes, fight choreography and some of the best martial artists alive on the planet.
The movie stars Jet Li as the super bad ass nameless hero, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and the Iron Monkey bad-ass Donnie Yen as a group of Assassins and Zhang Ziyi the girl from Crouching Tiger as an assassin groupie.
This movie is more an abstract costume drama than a realistic look at history but it will be eaten up by action movie audiences. Some of the sets and action are so stylized that it seems a bit over done at times. I mean there are some chapters where all the sets, lights and costumes are the same color and shade. It almost looks like a black and white movie that was projected through a color filter.
The movie is often more cool and trendy than logical and it is almost a parody of itself but that type of hyper over the top dramatism is what Flying Swordsman movies are all about. I swear that about half the movie takes place in wire and computer graphics assisted slow motion. The best fight in the movie was the first one in the movie between Jet Li and Donnie Yen.
The movie is 100% beautiful all the time and there is a nice English dub job to go with the Mandarin. This was a very palatable to the west Chinese flying swordsman flick that made good use of it's big budget and triple A cast. The marketing of this movie is to follow up on Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in trying to expose this very stylized Chinese action drama the US audiences.
There is just enough emotion and to keep the girls in the audience and just enough ass kicking to keep the guys in the seats. But if you relax and enjoy this movie with a nice mug of beer and a bowl of pork fried rice it can be a lot of fun.
Jake at January 21, 2005 
Reviews
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.8bitjoystick.com/cgi-bin/mtype/mt-tb.cgi/752
Comments
I was amazed by this movie. Mostly with the art direction and interesting plot, a bit dry at times but overall damn good.
Posted by: Ray at January 21, 2005 11:35 AM
WTF? Quentin Tarantino Presents??????
what's that supposed to mean?
Posted by: Jim at January 21, 2005 11:35 AM
Miramax wanted to butcher the film for American audiences, and Quentin Tarantino complained.
So Miramax made a deal with Tarantino, they would release the movie unedited if they could put his name on it.
Posted by: Kyven at January 21, 2005 1:59 PM
It's a gorgeous movie, yes, but the blatant jingoism is really, really off-putting.
Zhang Yimou’s Hero – The Temptations of Fascism
http://www.filmint.nu/netonly/eng/heroevanschan.htm
Posted by: nowak at January 21, 2005 2:07 PM
Yeah the Wikipedia article talked about possile pro-Red China politcal meaning to the film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_%28movie%29#Political_meaning.3F
Then again I love how Dragon Inn is considered a political film about the Hong Kong 1997 handover.
http://www.8bitjoystick.com/archives/jake_review_dragon_inn_dvd.php
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at January 21, 2005 8:23 PM
thx for the info about Tarantino @ Kyven!
Posted by: Jim at January 22, 2005 1:08 AM
