Hero?

I saw the new Zhang Limou/Jet Li movie Hero on Saturday. It's certainly one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. And the acting was quite good, and the fights were spectacular, if overlong and overmany.

But.

At the end the whole film took a decidedly disturbing turn, one which seems to endorse the current Communist regime's brutal repression of dissent in China. Joshua Tanzer, in his review at OFFOFFOFF, also notices this ugly political message.

Plenty of people will just sit back and enjoy the fast-paced action, charismatic actors and lush colors of "Hero," so why get stuck on this one issue? Well, this question about how to respond to pro-fascist film has been around almost as long as film itself — we still debate the merits of the pro-slavery "Birth of a Nation" and the pro-Nazi "Triumph of the Will." (I would even throw in the less overtly pro-Jim Crow "Gone with the Wind.") And the answer is that films help shape our visual, psychological and intellectual instincts, and this is a film that teaches beauty, violence and authoritarianism at once. A beautiful film that exalts killing opponents of the state is a beautiful parchment on which is written, in the most elegant calligraphy, a manifesto for evil.

(hero)


8/31 update: Two readers' letters to salon.com about Salon's review of Hero