ABSTRACT
As is the case in China, reception of Zhang Yimou’s Hero in North America is varied, ranging from enthusiastic adulation of its lush imagery and colour, fantastical technique, emotional intensity, subtle symbolism and deep meaning, to scornful criticism of its excessive showiness, shallow plot, lack of character development, toadying politics and fascist aesthetics. Interpretations of one of the film’s key moments – when Nameless and Broken Sword refuse to kill the King of Qin – cover a similarly expansive scope, with some critics praising it as complex or subtle, and others condemning it as an overt acceptance of totalitarian unity over diverse plurality. With a profusion of film review websites as well as blogs and commentaries, hundreds of pages of English-language commentary on Hero are readily accessible, without the location or national affiliation of the writer always apparent.1 Those writing on Hero include people of many nationalities, races, ages and interests, some of whom approach film as completely amateur critics, others with professional training, as well as everything in between. The ideas they express are hardly uniform in ideology, style, depth of analysis, sophistication or historical understanding. It is impossible, therefore, to pinpoint one common interpretation of the film or to claim that there is an identifiable quality to North American reception of Hero. Viewers in Chinese language and culture locales such as China, Taiwan and Hong Kong engage in heated, nuanced and historically informed debates, and appear more interested in topics such as national identity. However, it makes little sense to state that while Chinese viewers “were angered by what they believed to be the film’s political stand – a justification of despotism in the history of China”, American viewers “were simply enchanted by this spectacular epic and no one (except some from the Chinese community here) seems to have felt offended by it” (Zhang, 2005: 47). A cursory survey of reviews in North America shows that statement to be at best a simplification.
