茶 FIRST IMPRESSIONS
茶 REVIEW OF BOOKS & FILMS

[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “Our Land: What Hero Still Understands About the Price of a Country” by Zubair Mahar

Zhang Yimou (director). Hero, 2002. 99 min.

I was fifteen, and I had come for a sword fight. That is what the poster promised, what the trailer promised, what everyone who mentioned the film to me had promised: a wuxia epic, men flying over rooftops, blades catching the light. I sat down expecting choreography. I stood up two hours later unable to speak, because the film had not given me a fight. It had given me a country, and every colour that country had ever bled.

Christopher Doyle‘s camera does something I had never seen a camera do before. It stops being neutral. Each retelling of the assassination plot against the King of Qin arrives dressed in its own colour: red for jealousy and desire, blue for a version closer to reason, white for whatever remains when the lies are stripped away, and, at the very end, green, then the pale, almost colourless shade of fact. I did not understand, at fifteen, that a colour could be an argument. I understand it now, after multiple viewings. Every hue in that film is a different way of remembering the same afternoon, and none of them is exactly a lie. They are simply what memory looks like from inside a particular grief.

Nameless sits before the Emperor and tells his story three times, and each time the story changes, and each time it is still true. I thought of Akira Kurosawa‘s Rashomon (1950) before I knew enough to call it that. But Hero was never really interested in who did what to whom. It was interested in a harder question, the one that sat in my chest for weeks afterwards. What does a person owe to the wholeness of a nation when the price of that wholeness is everything they love?

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Broken Sword writes two characters in the sand before he dies. Our Land. Not his land, not the King’s land. Ours, the impossible, aching, collective thing that swallows the individual and is somehow still worth the swallowing. That is the philosophy the film hands you without apology. Unification as a kind of violence that ends violence, tyranny accepted so that tyranny, at last, might stop repeating itself. I remember resisting this at twenty-four. More than resisting it, I remember being unable to look away from it. Nameless lowers his sword at ten paces, the closest he will ever come to killing the Emperor, not because he is weak, but because he has understood something Broken Sword understood before him. The wheel turns whether you throw yourself beneath it, and sometimes the only freedom left to a person is choosing how they will be crushed.

And yet the film never tells you that resistance was wrong. It tells you that resistance was noble and necessary, and it also tells you that peace, bought at any price, has its own terrible dignity. Both things sit in the same frame without apologising for each other. That is the whirlwind I still carry from that first viewing, not a lesson, but a weight handed to me without instructions for how to set it down.

What moved me first was the love. Broken Sword and Flying Snow, killing each other by inches over a betrayal that was never a betrayal, dying in each other’s arms in a forest turned the colour of dried blood. I had never seen jealousy filmed as tenderly as violence, or violence filmed as tenderly as a wedding. But even that love, on a second and third viewing, stopped feeling like the point. It felt like the toll. Two people offered up so that a larger argument about unity could be made whole.

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Hero was made in the years after Zhang Yimou had spent a decade filming ordinary people quietly crushed by history: a peasant woman, a schoolteacher, a family inside a walled courtyard. Here he turned towards myth instead, to the King of Qin, who would become the first Emperor of a unified China, and to the old legend of the assassin, reworked until it no longer resolved the way legend demands. Christopher Doyle, known then for his restless, colour-drunk work in the back alleys of Hong Kong, brought that same intoxication to open plains and painted lakes, and it did not feel borrowed. It felt like exactly the eye a founding myth needed, one trained to find the ache inside a single colour, now let loose on an empire deciding what it was willing to become.

I went looking for an action film. I found a civilisation at its crossroads, arguing in red and blue about what a people sacrifice for survival, Great China among them, still choosing, again and again, the unbearable weight of Our Land.

^{How to cite: Mahar, Zubair. “Our Land: What Hero Still Understands About the Price of a Country.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Aug. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/08/24/hero-film.}

Zubair Mahar is an education project manager and programme coordinator based between Sukkur and Karachi, Pakistan. A Commonwealth Scholar completing an MA in Educational Leadership in Practice at the University of Manchester, he is the founder of Eduwings, which has guided more than twenty students from marginalised backgrounds towards fully funded scholarships abroad.