Quote:
Originally Posted by Sgoilear
I always looked at Hero as being a kind of Just War following the political science view. War is a terrible thing but it may very well have been for the better to have a large war and then rule consolidated under one government. Certainly the peasants would suffer more in the short term but the long term gain outweighed that in my eyes.
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I wasn't making a comment on whether the war and the bloodshed that led to unification was justified or not in the long run, just that that was what I saw as the thesis of the movie. The emperor united the kingdoms through a bloody war of aquisition, which may or may not have been justified, but once unification had been achieved, to oppose it would have been to bring about a greater evil than had supposedly been perpetuated by the wars.
I'm not sure I agree with that. It's one of those things like the dropping of the first bomb on Hiroshima; it's such a big thing, with such a powerful result on each side that it's beyond me to see which is the right and which is the wrong.
Heh. For a comic book geek, there are good parallels in both
V for Vendetta and
Watchmen, the first of which argues strongly against a pragmatic peace created by evil means, and the second which may be arguing in favor of it, depending upon whether you view Rorshach or Ozymandias as the hero.
Watchmen definitely has the other characters' pragmatic acceptance of the situation at the end, despite the means used to achieve it, as pretty much the same thing you see in Hero.
I thought, for a wuxia picture,
House of Flying Daggars was more convincing. The basic premise there, that the biggest enemy we face is the internal one, both as individuals and as organizations, is something I can definitely relate to.
Gilda