Deeply murky beneath its glassy surface, “Hero” is a Party Movie to make the comrades weep with nation-feeling. The iron grip of the Soviets might never have loosened if Russian history had allowed for the sexy wire-fu on display in this dumb Kodacolor epic. Jet Li and his buddies prance through woods, tiptoe on laketops, and whirl among the walls of fortresses in scenes of gravity-defying martial arts that aspire to the grace and lift of lyric poetry.

As neat as some of the effects are, none is even remotely affecting. They are slack with niggling pointlessness—spears bend, swords flop like fish, and because every physical movement is allowed none  seems remarkable. There is less poetry in all of “Hero” than in one minute’s worth of floating astronauts in Kubrick’s “2001”.

The real howler here is the ridiculous “Our Land” theme. The faceless masses serve the tyrannical leader who rules by bloody fiat. The understanding seems to be that after the law is higher mission is carried out—to be called “purges” a few centuries later—the Emperor will lay down the sword in favor of peace. Given the national origin of this film, it comes as little surprise that the smudged fingerprints of Chinese communism are all over the film. Everyone is a nobody, and oh how crisply the People march!

Pride in technology is present, too; the apparatchiks must have been nodding their heads in satisfaction at the Qin army’s crossbow corps, which looks like a giant SoloFlex class with leather helmets. Still, it’s strange to see party propaganda in a modern movie with mainstream Hollywood production values like this. You’d think even the hardliners would have given up their ideology about proles controlling the means of production after the latest Adam Sandler vehicle.

Li’s character is known only as “Nameless”, but he ought to have been called “Jobless”, a title well earned by wandering from place to place asking his friends to die in his po-faced palace plots. Shame the film didn’t opt for a bit of comedy by including the scene in which he explains his plan. (“Sounds good, Nameless. The part where you stab me through the chest so as to miss all my vital organs, though...”) In any case, there is little explanation about his motives. Justice and vengeance are mentioned, but never explained. Is the Emperor a murderer, or isn’t he? Are the kingdoms separate for good reason or not? Unanswered questions.

The real enemy is war, and to make peace the best solution is to lay down arms and bow before the mightier army, adhere to the hierarchy which places order above reason, security above truth. Makes sense, after a fashion. Having the ability to kill a thousand soldiers without breaking a sweat starts to look like showing off after awhile. You could win a war like that. Ask the Trojans about Achilles, for instance. Then again, Brad Pitt didn’t have to fight wearing those billowy white robes. “Hero” might be the first film in history to have product tie-ins with Linens ‘N’ Things.

Joking aside, this film is highly insulting to anyone who remembers Tiananmen Square. As it is surely meant to, the image of Nameless standing against a horde of soldiers evokes the lone student halting a column of tanks at the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989. In the classic revisionist manner of communism, though, the symbolism is distorted into an act of weird anti-martyrdom in the name of statehood. But killing the helpless in the name of peace is unacceptable under any terms. A tyrannical authority may conceal its weapons for a time, but it will never relinquish them altogether. Yimou Zhang has taken the beauty of Asian martial arts cinema and used it as a disgusting and feeble-minded apology for dictatorship.

Even the aesthetics are compromised by the politics: Zhang builds an interesting storyline about a warrior who has found the secret link between writing and swordsmanship, and yet the warrior’s ultimate act is to accept extinction at the hands of a tyrant who promises to abolish all forms of writing except one—his own. There is the possibility that in this one paradox Zhang provides a clue that points toward a buried subversion of this apotheosis of the State, but I doubt it. Some intriguing uses of color and cinematography aside, this film exists solely as an exercise in bootlicking obedience.