For some reason, American world history courses tend to stint on China, though it has a very long and distinguished history. Even Will Durant, in the eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, grants China only a small part of the first volume. Consequently, most of us are confused about the difference between the Qing and Ming dynasties, and when it comes to the Era of Warring States we are completely at sea.

I seem to vaguely remember, from articles in El Popola Ĉinio, that the era in question predates Christ by a couple of centuries. Unlike the recent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was set sometime in the Qing dynasty period (probably in the 18th, possibly the early 19th, century, by European reckoning), Hero takes place way back then, when the kingdom of Qin, under “the Qin king” (one supposes, the legendary Shen Chi Huang Ti, but the name is never mentioned), was struggling to subsume all its neighboring kingdoms into what would eventually become China. ⁽¹⁾

Actor Jet Li is a Nameless assassin who, in what would appear to be a fit of patriotism, has succeeded in assassinating three top assassins representing the Kingdom of Zhao, which is attempting to avoid being absorbed by Qin. Nameless recounts his encounters to the Qin king (Chen Daoming), whom he has been taken to meet because of these acts. The Qin king, a man of remarkable perspicacity, quickly deduces that, in fact, Nameless killed these three assassins simply to get into proximity to him so that he might carry out an assassination that they had failed at. Nameless admits this, but then corrects the king’s deduced version of events to explain how things really happened — and why Nameless has not yet carried out the assassination.

Most of the film consists of flashbacks in which the stories, as told by Nameless and the king, are shown on the screen. In only one of the cycles does Nameless kill the first assassin, Sky (Donnie Yen); most of the story concentrates on different variants of his relationship with the lover-assassins Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Broken Sword (Leung Chiu Wai) and with Broken Sword’s disciple Moon (the delectable Zhang Ziyi, the “hidden dragon” of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

Lots of magnificent desert scenery, more reminiscent of the wilder parts of Xinjiang province than of what most of us (and, likely, most Chinese) think of as China. Lots of great army scenes (either computer-generated or China can provide a lot of extras), and medieval English longbowmen would look with envy on the film’s “arrow storms”. The person-on-person fights are enlivened by a great amount of what Jet Li, in an interview, called “wire work”, and if you read the credits assiduously, you’ll find several companies — four, I believe — hired to erase the wires from the film.

I am still not clear about what the color-change of the robes worn by Snow, Sword and Moon from cycle to cycle means. In the first variant (Nameless killing them to save Qin king) the robes were red, in the second variant (Nameless killing them to get near Qin king) the robes were blue, and in the third variant (Nameless only pretending to kill them to get near Qin King — but convinced by Broken Sword not to carry through in the murder of the Qin king) the robes were white.

In many ways, this was a more spectacular film that Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but the story was also simpler and less well-developed. The patriotic theme will probably go right over the heads of American audiences — but then we have our own patriotic conventions, which are likely incomprehensible to people outside the United States.

One thing troubled me about the film; about 20 percent of the audience had an unfortunate tendency to laugh at moments that I considered highly emotional. This may have been more at some of the acting techniques used in the film, many of which are also foreign to American conventions.

⁽¹⁾ For a somewhat different view of this activity than the one given in the film, read Guo Mo-ruo’s play Bronze Tiger (you might find the English translation more easily under a title such as The Tiger Talisman). However, the current movie seems to be trying to arouse Chinese patriotism internally, while Guo had Qin playing the role of the Japanese in an attempt to arouse anti-Japanese determination.