| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Hero . Directed by Yimou Zhang. Produced by Quentin Tarantino. Written by Yimou Zhang, Feng Li, and Bin Wang. In Chinese with English subtitles. 2004; color and black and white; 99 minutes. Distributed by Miramax.

If lush cinematography and balletic violence were sufficient substitutes for plot and characterization, Zhang Yimou's Hero would be a perfect movie. Instead, it is repetitious and kitschy, with Chinese artifacts from the Qin period exploded into grotesquely large proportions à la H. K. mall-moderne. The film is brashly patriotic in the "you're with-us-or-agin-us" style. The romance takes off from the stuff of history that has lent itself admirably to epic tales for millennia: the unification in 221 B.C. of the territory roughly corresponding to the present People's Republic of China (minus the so-called autonomous regions), under the direction of the First Emperor of Qin (a.k.a. Qin Shihuang), a figure well known to museum-goers thanks to the seven thousand terracotta warriors guarding his burial grounds in present-day Xi'an. Chinese histories endlessly recount the concerted attempts by the various states contending for supremacy with Qin during the Warring States period (475–222 B.C.) to infiltrate assassin-retainers into the Qin court, whose emperor, by a combination of luck and guile, managed somehow to survive and triumph—at least for a decade or so. (The movie omits the denouement: the First Emperor dies ignominiously, his son and heir is executed by the very ministers who had been hand-picked by Qin Shihuang, and effective control by the Qin Empire collapses within the year.)

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