Hero: A beautiful movie with a rotten message
November 28th 2006 10:13
Hero
What do you do when you find a beautiful work of art with a rotten message at its core? Should you try to be balanced and detach the art part of the thing from its message? Or be repelled even more to see such effort going into the promotion of indigestible pablum?
I faced the same dilemma when I saw Hero. First, of all I don't like Matrix type of wire stunts and I do not like the so-called martial arts movies where the guys are cartwheeling in thin air. Hero serves up both these things with a ballerina kind of pretentiousness. I was put off by the whole thing. Except it's written well and technically one of the best plots I've seen in movies.
There is a Chin Emperor of China, who is bent on unifying the fragmented China at any cost. This puts him at odds with the smaller feudalities particularly the Zhaos. Three deadly assassins have sworn to kill him and they nearly succeeded too. As a result, our king doesn't let anyone nearer than 100 feet of his person and leads a lonely life.
The movie starts when a small local warrior called Nameless is brought to the city because he has killed all the three warriors. The king is curious to know how this happened and with every tale the warrior is granted an audience with His Majesty that is much nearer. Nameless tells him three stories and reached within ten feet of the King. Till now, the movie is a yawn but it suddenly turns when the king comes with a riposte. He doesn't buy the tales of Nameless and gives his own alternative version. Nameless is impressed but the king makes some mistakes and he rectifies them in yet another retelling of what happened. This criss-crossing of narrative is a brilliant strategy and holds you attention like a charm.
It now transpires that Nameless actually wanted to kill the King and has mastered a skill whereby he can kill him within ten feet, To get to that proximity, he beseeches co-operation from the other three assassins. Two agree to help him, even become ready to die to buy the audience for Nameless. One disagrees and says that the king shouldn't be killed.
It is this defection that causes a lot of friction in the story. The assassin who doesn't want to kill the king writes a calligraphic syllable for Nameless. Our Land, it says. No matter how cruel the king is he shouldn't be killed because he's trying to unite China.
It's now become painfully clear that this is a well-mounted, beautifully made propaganda piece about Taiwan. It both wags a finger at wider world not to interfere in China's "internal problems" and fantasises about the breakaway rebels laying down their arms as well. The makers are not unaware of the cost of this unification. If Zhao has to be taken in the consolidated empire, rivers of blodd have to flow. And yet, that's necessary because it banishes the artifical boundaries of the world. The King doesn't want to stop at unifying just the six fragments of China; he wants to abolish the borders of the rest of the world too and achieve One world.
As for my original question, my choice is clear. No matter how beautiful the film, one cannot accept this blatant, bloodthirsty warning from the idealogical zealots.
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