t seems we waited to see this one forever, but when Miramax finally quit delaying it and kicked it out the door in the traditional late August dumping period, we had our chance.

Malaya and I caught Hero on Friday, opening day, at a 4:45 show. The movie was playing on two screens in the 14-plex, our theater was medium full, and the crowd was much more racially-mixed and a bit older than most movies we see. There were kids, but it wasn't dominated by hyper 14 y/o's, as was the case with other recent PG-13 action films like Van Helsing and AVP.

Malaya (who is Asian) and I usually sit back and watch the crowd come in, and poke each other if anyone not-white appears. We're usually seeing movies in Concord or Walnut Creek, both pretty middle/upper class areas, so you expect mostly white people, but most of the movies we see seem to have 99% white people in attendance. Malaya is one of the few exceptions, most times, but with Hero there was a substantial scattering of Asians and even a few black people. The age range was wider also, with lots of adults and even seniors; an age group we virtually never see at other action films.

I have no idea how Hero was marketed, but I suppose a lot of adults in their 50s and older saw Crouching Tiger, probably on DVD, thought it was intelligent and enjoyable, and remembered that when Hero commercials came up? I'm just wondering how so many people who normally do not see action movies turned out for this one. What was it about the marketing or the look of the film that was so different, and why did it attract all the old people, and conversely, why didn't as many teens flock to this as we usually see for things like Van Helsing or Tomb Raider or Chronicles of Riddick?

The audience demographic aside, how was the film itself?

Hero
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 4
Humor: N/A
Horror: N/A
Eye Candy: 9
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 5
Overall: 6.5

I enjoyed the movie, I'm not sorry I paid $5.75 to see it, but I was hoping/expecting a lot more than I got. My hope was for another film like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with action/fight sequences just as good, scenery just as gorgeous, and a plot just as involving.  Hero lived up to the CTHD hopes on the scenery, but it had a much more static plot, the fight scenes weren't nearly as good as those in CTHD, the characters in it weren't as memorable or powerful, the acting wasn't as good, the directing wasn't as good, and the story had virtually no emotional resonance for me. I watched it, I enjoyed the pretty colors and the quality fight scenes, and then it was over. I didn't care who won, I didn't care which version of the story told turned out to be true, and I didn't have anyone to root for. The movie felt at least 30 minutes too long to me, and often felt like it was trying way too hard.

One of my frequent comments about Anime is that it sometimes dooms itself by trying to hard to be cool for the sake of being cool. Hero is similar, but the problem isn't coolness, since it doesn't try for that. It does with the scenery and visuals however, and the style in the fight scenes. It's an undeniably gorgeous movie, and the only reason I didn't give it a 10 in eye candy is because the whole movie is trying to desperately to get an 11. Every scene is composed with gorgeous visuals, beautiful colors from side to side, flying yellow or red tree leaves, 5000 guards in all black armor with red plumes on their visors, flying water ballet sword fights in blue-tinted valleys, impossibly-dense flights of jet black arrows, etc. It's all very fairy tale (that will be a frequent theme in this review) but when every single scene in the movie is trying so hard to be gorgeous, it gets a bit overkill.

By the time the endless series of flashbacks that make up the plot got around to showing an earlier scene in the royal palace, I was wondering how they would change the look of it, or make it visually distinct from the main plot line, which features Jet Li (the titular nameless Hero) talking to the Emperor in that same palace. And when the earlier version of the palace was shown, of course the entire interior of the vast hall was hung with transparent, billowing (the indoor wind came from where?) green sheets of silk, every one of which were large enough to cover a tennis court. Why? Because the characters were wearing emerald green in that segment (they change costumes half a dozen times, always sporting a new color and looking damn good in it) and they could match the billowing sheets of silk, while also allowing the scene to culminate with all of the sheets dropping down at once, in amazing billowing fashion. I yawned at a visual that would stand out with astonishing clarity in a regular movie, but that became just another pretty moment in the jam-packed Hero. It sort of reminded me of the problem with the last few James Bond movies; the stunts and action sequences aren't bad, it's just that when the entire movie is a non-stop cartoonish stunt sequence, the viewer grows bored and jaded.

Crouching Tiger had amazingly-gorgeous sets and visuals, but they weren't the entire movie. There were scenes in many different environments; the green bamboo forest, sun-baked desert, misty mountain cliffs, etc, but they were well-integrated into the movie (characters didn't leave a desert and instantly enter a rose garden just because it would be pretty on film) and there were enough "real" looking places that the gorgeous ones stood out. In Crouching Tiger there wasn't anything visually astonishing about the restaurant the girl wrecked in the big fight scene there, or in the dojo she fought the older female character in, or in the cave the movie ended in. They all looked nice, but nothing amazing, and that made the gray stone city and the bamboo forest and the desert and the Shao Lin retreat at the end that much more beautiful.  If CTHD had gone the same way Hero did, the inside of the restaurant would have been entirely done in light purple, with all the bad guys wearing identical gold and the lone girl wearing white.

I'm speculating there, of course, but my point is that Hero so obviously went out of its way to put everyone into matching costumes that perfectly matched the scenery, and to set every scene somewhere that looked ethereally beautiful that it seemed unreal and artificial. To me, at least.

The visuals are much like the rest of the film though; you just have to suspend your disbelief. CTHD had a similar requirement, but just for some of their skills. You had to accept that some characters could fly, or at least glide over long distances, but other than that it hewed pretty closely to the laws of physical reality. Hero is ten times less grounded (pun intended) in reality, and that extends to the visuals, the plot, the actions of the characters, and so on. Virtually nothing can be analyzed or measured with a normal stick, since it's not real, and it's not meant to be real.  Of course the characters can fight over a pond for five minutes while redirecting themselves by dipping the tips of their swords into the liquid. Of course two characters can leave a building in a desert during a war siege and immediately enter a boundless forest where every single tree is covered in autumn-yellow leaves. Of course a deadly battle scene in the gray rocky plains of a desert can be instantly followed by the defeated character resting in the most impossibly gorgeous and growing lake valley imaginable.

You simply have to suspend your disbelief about almost everything, and keep it suspended for the duration, or you'll spend the entire movie thinking, "That could never happen." You'll be correct, but you'll ruin the movie for yourself.

Even with the somewhat lacking plot and visuals that tried too hard, I would have forgiven (almost) all if the fight scenes had measured up to CTHD's. Sadly, none of them did. While watching yet another "fly madly in every direction with the help of wires and quick editing while never actually hitting anything" style battle, it occurred to me that Hero would have worked better, for me at least, as anime. Since every battle scene in the movie was all superhero stuff (blocking hundreds of incoming arrows, flying over water, cutting fifty targets on every side of a huge room in seconds, defeating hundreds of guards while not taking a single scratch personally, etc) I would have enjoyed it more as anime, where the visuals would have looked more realistic, and I'd have been more ready to accept superhuman stunts.

Real people look silly engaged in an overlong midair water ballet as they glide and clash and soar over water, when it's obviously done with lots of wire shots, lots of editing, and there's never a long shot that lasts for more than a second.  If it was all just special effects or animation the characters could be shown leaping, diving, slashing, etc, all in continuous long shots, and it wouldn't be so obviously edited together.  Failing that radical a change, I think Hero could have used some more special effects. There were hardly any visual effects, other than computer erasing of the wires that let the characters fly. Other scenes had things added, like many of the passing arrows and swirling leaves, but there weren't any waves of force coming off of blades, or streaks of light as sword slashes cut through the air. Those would probably have looked silly, but it was pretty silly when two characters cut through hundreds of enemy troops, their spinning tornado-like swings never coming within five feet of anyone, yet still sending the enemy flying backwards and in every direction as though invisible waves of energy were surging out and blasting into the soldiers.  If we've got to pretend something is happening for a scene to make any sense, why not show some visual evidence of it?

I also wasn't a huge fan of the sequential flashback story-telling device that powered the plot. It's done in the Rashomon style, which is an old film by Kurosawa that's hugely-influential and famous and that everyone talks about while hardly anyone has ever actually seen. The technique gets its name from that film since it was the first to use the style; basically it's just a visual representation of different points of view; one person says something and you see their version acted out, then another person says something different and you see that version, with the same characters doing something different. As with most great movie innovations, it was brilliant and revolutionary at the time, but is now so commonplace that it doesn't raise an eyebrow.

In Hero I thought it got a bit tedious.

The plot, without going into any details that you don't learn in the first 15 minutes, is about a nameless hero (he's actually billed as "Nameless" in the credits, for reasons that the movie makes clear) who comes to the great emperor, claiming to have killed three dangerous assassins who had sworn to kill the emperor and bringing their three weapons with him as proof. As Nameless tells his story we see long flashback scenes of him doing what he says he did. Those are followed by scenes of what the emperor thinks happened, then by more scenes from Nameless' PoV, and so on until we finally get to the bottom of what actually happened, and the flashbacks end and the conclusion takes place in present time.

I don't dislike the technique used, but the "he said" vs "the other he said" thing got old for me, mostly since I didn't really care who was correct and what actually happened. I just wanted to see how things would turn out.  I was somewhat surprised by the ending, since just exactly what the Hero's fate would be (at least to me, Malaya said she saw it coming long in advance) was a mystery, but that doesn't mean that I cared. I don't have a "page turner" rating score for movies, but Hero wouldn't have scored very highly on that scale, since I wasn't feeling much suspense. In fact, maybe I should have a "suspense" score on my rating scale, since right now it's sort of combined in with the "script/story" rating, and those were different for Hero.  I liked the script and the story concept; I just didn't think it was executed all that well. So I'd give the script and concept about an 8, the story a 7, and the suspense like a 3. All of those factored in together turned into a 6 in the scores above, and that's sort of a wishy washy way to do things.

On the other hand, if the current scoring system has worked well enough for 80+ movies that I've never felt a need to modify it until now, perhaps I shouldn't worry about it too much.

To briefly mention one other rating category, you'll note that I didn't score Hero in the "humor" rating, since there is none. There are no attempts at humor, and no successes at it either. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's another thing that Crouching Tiger did better. That movie was far from a comedy, but it had some amusing characters and some levity amongst all the solemn death and suffering and sacrifice. Remember CTHD's inept dojo guard with his huge spear with the jingling rings on it? He was comedy, without being outright idiotic comedy relief, and adding some humor to the fight scenes made me enjoy them more.

There is one slightly humorous element in one fight scene in Hero, when two swordsmen begin batting water back and forth, down a single drop being smacked from one sword to the other. It got a few laughs in the theater, but I didn't laugh, and I'm not sure it was supposed to be funny. The rest of that sequence was as solemn and serious and full of deep emotion as the rest of the movie was (trying to be) and I thought it was just a way to show the incredibly-exact control these two men had over their blades.  In any event, one slight laugh in an entire film still isn't enough to deserve a rating in the humor category, intentional or not.

In conclusion, I think I'm concentrating too much on the nit picky things in this review. Hero isn't a masterpiece, but it's a very, very good movie. If I didn't have CTHD to compare it to I'd probably have thought it was amazingly good, if a bit slow in the plot development and somewhat too "non-contact" in the fight scenes. But since I did, I had to find Hero lacking in several areas, and after all, comparisons are what movie reviewing is all about. Just imagine, if we couldn't compare movies to other movies, we'd all have thought Episode 1 and 2 were Sci-Fi masterpieces, eh?

If you at all like this type of movie, or you enjoyed CTHD, you really should see Hero. I'm glad I did, despite my complaints, and since most of the critics and Malaya liked it a lot more than I did, don't let my few misgivings spoil your fun.

Box Office

August 30, 2004

Hero opened quite well, in the #1 spot, and made the most money ever for a release in late August. Of course late August is the traditional dumping ground for all the crap studios have had cooling on their shelves for months or years, so that's not saying all that much, but any time a movie with subtitles makes big money in the US, it's news. I wonder how much money it might have made if Miramax hadn't stupidly delayed it a year and a half, as the Box Office Mojo guy elaborates on in his weekend recap article.

Miramax drew criticism for the way it handled Hero. Its fall 2002 release in Asia and its Best Foreign Language nomination at the 2003 Academy Awards portended to it hitting theaters by spring 2003. The distributor constantly shuffled release dates, raising questions if it would ever reach theaters -- all the while the picture had been available on DVD from overseas markets. When the late August date and a limited release pattern were finally announced, it appeared as if Miramax was unceremoniously clearing out inventory as studios often do this time of year.

For a subtitled film that finished its theatrical run in most of the world 2 years ago, and has been available on foreign DVD for well over a year -- racking up $18m the first weekend is really quite amazing. There's even better news further down in the article, about the director's next film.

Yimou's next picture House of Flying Daggers, starring Zhang Ziyi from Hero and Crouching Tiger, is poised for platform release starting Dec. 3 by Sony Pictures Classics -- five years after the specialty distributor nurtured Crouching Tiger to its smashing $128.1 million success. House recently broke Hero's record as the top grossing movie ever in mainland China.

There's one nice thing about Miramax delaying Hero so much; the guy's next movie is already done and about to hit theaters. Flying Daggers premiered at Cannes earlier this year, and garnered quite a bit of positive media attention. I've even got a review page for it already, just to contain pre-movie blog entries from Cannes.  I was a little disappointed by Hero, (see my review below) but I had very high expectations going in, which is a sure way to achieve disappointment. I'm still interested in seeing Flying Daggers though, especially if it's actually released in three months, rather than January 2007, as it would be if Miramax were handling the schedule.

Pre-Movie Discussion

April 17, 2004

They had a trailer for Hero, which may be a great movie, a sort of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thing. Unfortunately it was called Ying Xiong and released in Asia about 3 years ago, and still isn't available in the US on anything other than very expensive imported DVDs that won't play on US DVD players anyway. It's finally getting released in the US in June, apparently, but it keeps being delayed. It was due out last year in the Fall, and then this year in the spring, and finally it's coming in the summer. Pending further delays.

It looks awesome in theory; huge battles, sword fights galore, wire fu, gorgeous scenery, etc. And yet they can't seem to put together one decent trailer, and you can't tell if it's a romance or a battle movie or what. I've been following this one from foreign trailers since before I even knew Malaya, and she was previews for it when she was working overseas like two years ago, before she'd ever heard of me. And here we are still waiting. It's now being handled by Miramax, and the trailer kicked off with a mention of Quentin Tarentino's name, as if he's got anything to do with it other than it appealing to people who like Kill Bill 2 type movies.

April 19, 2004

April 20, 2004

Since I have nothing else to talk about, let's do a quick reader mail.  Following up on yesterday's reader mail about Hero, which I segued into a discussion of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, here's Andrew.

The ideal is something Tarentino-esque, like Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill 2, where there is a main story, with main characters, but they're constantly interacting with other characters who are interesting and have their own existence as well, rather than just taking up space to advance the plot. Or get shot during a mindless action sequence.  That sort of thing is much easier to do in a novel, where you've got space and time to develop things, but hey, who said making a good movie was easy?

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