week 8 post

The film Hero emphasizes the power of words. Even before digging deeper into the meaning of the words I can tell by the characters names that the director had some meaning behind the names of the character. Nameless, Broken Sword, Flying Snow, and Long Sky are some of the unique names given to the characters in this film. Also there is a part in this film where the main character, Nameless, goes to a temple to have the word "sword" be written in Chinese. This takes a while because there are about 80 ways to write this certain expression. This shows the importance of not only of a word, but also about the way it is written. This film has a big emphasis on words and it is proven in a scene where a grand army marches towards the temple where the calligraphy is taking place. The people in the temple are painting characters and the army shoots hundreds of thousands of arrows at the temple hoping to kill everyone inside and thus preventing them from writing characters. Nameless fights alongside Flying Snow to fend off the arrows so that the word "sword" could be properly written. From this scene, I can tell that the film has a big focus on words.