Ikarus65

"Hero" is beautiful to watch thanks to the stunning cinematography by Christopher Doyle, who once again showcases the trademark style he has so successfully exercised in collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai and others. That's the sparkling surface of this movie, but unfortunately it's rotten at the very core. We can be sure the Chinese government and other totalitarian regimes very much like the message, since it serves perfectly as a justification for whatever action they deem necessary for the greater good of forming a "great nation". "Hero" is no laughing matter either. The movie is so obsessed with conveying its oh so important deep and meaningful message about the virtue of individual sacrifice for the greater good, that there is no room for humor and irony, even though there would have been plenty of opportunity for it.

Compared to the rating on IMDb, this movie was a big disappointment. How it can rank in the top-250 completely eludes me. I appreciate many of Tim Burton's other works, but this one is going nowhere for the most part. First and foremost, it is too long for the little bit of story it has to tell. Most of the problems are with incoherencies of the script and bad timing of those scenes intended to be funny. The acting is also less than stellar (with one noteworthy exception). Depp is portraying Wood as a retarded moron all the way through the movie and Patricia Arquette's acting is more wooden than Pinocchio's would ever be. Why would anyone care for the fate of such characters? Martin Landau, of course, shines and saves the movie single-handedly. His performance of Bela Lugosi is well worth the Academy Award it earned him.

Without the shadow of a doubt an incredible, extraordinary, unique, daring, moving, extremely well-crafted, amazingly acted masterpiece of a movie. As long as it is, one would not want to miss a single second of it and the time is more than well-spent. This is the ensemble movie that Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" would have liked to be, and it almost dwarfs P. T. Anderson's other fine efforts like "Boogie Nights". It is no less than a daring and ultimately successful attempt at capturing some of the most quintessential facets of human life: fate, love, death and forgiveness. I predict without hesitance, even though I know that the evidence might still be around when I'm long gone: this movie will be considered as one of the most essential cinematic works of our time. If you haven't seen it yet, go see it now! You have much to gain and nothing to lose, except perhaps that you may never again look at frogs the same way.