Hero, of Zhang Yimou

It is complex to frame the movie Hero in the movies of Zhang Yimou. It seems to mark the beginning of a stage characterized by the personages' big movements, the adaptation of historical topics, and a meticulous quality of the visual effects, which in certain form, contrast with an impoverishment of the narrative as such.

In "Hero" we see a reflection on the figure of the First Emperor, as well as this species of small social class known as "the killers", a scarce number of persons who owe his group value to the consideration as such in the Historical Records of Abyss Qian.

The action opens along three stories that narrate in fact the same history: the process that has allowed to "without name" to approach ten steps of the emperor, and to obtain, therefore, the possibility of killing him. The first one, in red, is the lie that Wuming tells to the emperor, of the form as it finished with his three worst hostile, famous teachers of the struggle.

Now they are only a man opposite to other, the emperor realizes that the killer, obtained the honor of sitting down to only ten distance steps, is capable of killing him in any moment, since his guard is to more than hundred. Speaking like two friends who were facing only in a game, he narrates the second history, in blue, the assumption that the emperor of the conspiracy makes schemed between wuming and his enemies, to finish with his life.

Into the third one, the killer, changes the sword into the word, in fact only it comes to count because it has not already killed him.

"Quite under the sky" it is the unit. The conviction of which only the unit will finish the continuous spilling of blood that the continuous wars of the period provoke exactly called "Fighting Kingdoms" impels the killer to leave his project.

Up to a few decades ago it was considered that any work that should treat about the first emperor, was a paradox on the President Mao. And in fact, the movie, once one allows to our senses to enjoy the coloring stagings that happen along the same one, only transmits to the brain a message: unit.

A message that better seems to fit in the program of a politician than in that of an artist. Perhaps he needs does such a tremendous spectator open of beauty to find the same message that it sees every day in mouth of the politicians?

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