Heroes who fail to amount to much

The story of those who sought to stop the king of Chin from obliterating the diverse kingdoms that later became China has been told in countless books, plays, operas and films. The films on this subject have attracted China's greatest cinematic talent, but on the whole have failed to amount to much. Hero, which opens in Taiwan today, sees another of China's great directors bite the dust in dealing with this same subject.

Zhang Yimou's (張藝謀) martial arts epic has been long anticipated, and he deals with this literary subject in an unconventional way. Indeed, one could almost say shocking, especially for those who have admired his earlier work.

Hero is certainly something to look at, with two of Hong Kong's most charismatic stars, Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) and Tony Leung (梁朝偉), beautiful cinematography by Christopher Doyle, and stunningly choreographed martial arts set pieces by Chen Hsiaodong (陳小東). The attention to visual detail -- long shots of water droplets catching the sunlight and hair floating in the wind -- create scenes that bear a closer resemblance to shampoo commercials than to epic cinema. The superficiality of all this is rather reenforced by the looseness of the story, the flatness of the characters and the problematic ending -- of which more later.

The story opens with Nameless (Jet Li), a sword fighter, entering the grand and forbidding palace of the king of Chin. The starkness of the hall represents the severity of Chin's law, and the symbolism sets the tone for the rest of the movie, which seems almost purposely to abjure any narrative warmth. Style, we are told in the opening scenes, is everything. The tricks that Zhang first used in Raise the Red Lantern (大紅燈籠高高掛) are brought out here, but the incorporation of Chinese "culture" in Hero has become heavy-handed, even intrusive -- quite an achievement for a martial arts film.

And Zhang hasn't gone for anything as mundane as historical accuracy in his first costume epic. There is lots of floating gauze and creatively designed weapons, and the Chin soldiers are subjected to the indignity of shooting off their bows with their feet while sitting on the ground, which Zhang has confessed has absolutely no basis in history. But it may be thought exotic by Western audiences.

The film's structure follows Akira Kurosawa's classic Rashomon (1950) in that it goes over the same ground a number of times from different perspectives -- in this case, a battle of wits between Nameless and the king as to how Nameless managed to kill off Sky (長空), Broken Sword (殘劍) and Flying Snow (飛雪), three of the assassins most feared by the king. By killing these three, Nameless has earned the right to come into the king's presence to receive his reward.

Unfortunately you never really care which of the versions presented is the true one because the director fails from the beginning to establish any empathy with the characters.

Which leads to the crucial issue of Zhang's resolution to his martial arts epic. Part of the uniqueness of his approach is that he violates many of the fundamental principles of the chivalric hero character -- apolitical, self-interested, care-free -- in order to achieve a grander vision, which unfortunately pulls the carpet out from under the feet of his "heroes," leaving them looking merely foolish. The end result is not an achievement of some higher state of heroism, but defeat at the hands of a tougher operator. For martial arts movie fans, it is all very unsatisfactory.