** Spoiler alert - don't read further but watch the movie instead! **
The whole movie is about the assassination attempt (OK, there is love and beauty and music, but the main plot is that). The main protagonist of the movie doesn't kill the emperor though as he understood what another character meant: that the emperor must not die, as the peace is possible only by uniting various ethnic groups by him.
On the surface, this kind of reasoning seems acceptable. In practice, though, forcing peace in this way just brings suffering and is a weak justification of imperialism. Look at the situation of Uighurs and Tibetans. A federation of states, in an integrated form like the USA or weaker like the EU seems to work much better in terms of benefits to their citizens than authoritarian empires in Chinese or Russian style.
I think that's reading too much into the movie. It's not an apologia of modern day China, it's a wuxia fable about imperial China, and the message of unity is not a bad one.
> A federation of states, in an integrated form like the USA or weaker like the EU seems to work much better in terms of benefits to their citizens than authoritarian empires in Chinese or Russian style.
That's a lot of baggage to unload into a wuxia movie. It's a movie, a folklore fable more in the style of a Chinese Rashomon (to which it's been compared) than a way to introduce political discourse. I wouldn't overanalyze it, just like I don't watch samurai movies to criticize them because Japanese feudal society wasn't democratic.
I can guarantee you "Hero" is not communist propaganda. I thought we were past this level of paranoia with the Cold War over.
Well, I had to look at the WP page just to check if I'm imagining things and nobody else thought about this (mind you, I'm a great fan of wuxia, and Hero is one of the best movies I've ever seen, with each minute being extremely satisfying on all levels). It turns out there are others[0]:
> Nevertheless, there were several film critics who felt the film had advocated autocracy and reacted with discomfort. J. Hoberman of The Village Voice deemed it to have a "cartoon ideology" and justification for ruthless leadership comparable to Triumph of the Will. Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post wrote an otherwise positive review but concluded: "The movie, spectacular as it is, in the end confronts what must be called the tyrant's creed, and declares itself in agreement with the tyrant."
** Spoiler alert - don't read further but watch the movie instead! **
The whole movie is about the assassination attempt (OK, there is love and beauty and music, but the main plot is that). The main protagonist of the movie doesn't kill the emperor though as he understood what another character meant: that the emperor must not die, as the peace is possible only by uniting various ethnic groups by him.
On the surface, this kind of reasoning seems acceptable. In practice, though, forcing peace in this way just brings suffering and is a weak justification of imperialism. Look at the situation of Uighurs and Tibetans. A federation of states, in an integrated form like the USA or weaker like the EU seems to work much better in terms of benefits to their citizens than authoritarian empires in Chinese or Russian style.