Ziyi Zhang Movie:

		List Price: $44.99		Label: Miramax Films Salesrank: 5538 Released: September 15, 2009
		Our Price: $26.69
		Used Price: $66.28
		MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
Master filmmaker Quentin Tarantino presents HERO -- starring martial arts legend Jet Li. This standout Special Edition, remastered and including an exciting new bonus feature, is a visually stunning epic where a fearless warrior rises up to defy an empire and unite a nation. With supernatural skill -- and no fear -- a nameless soldier (Jet Li) embarks on a mission of revenge against the fearsome army that massacred his people. Now, to achieve the justice he seeks, he must take on the empire's most ruthless assassins and reach the enemy he has sworn to defeat. Acclaimed by critics and honored with numerous awards, HERO was an Oscar(R) (Best Foreign Language Film, 2002) and Golden Globe nominee

Hero Special Edition (2-Disc Blu-ray with DVD + Digital Copy)[Blu-ray] [Blu-ray] Reviews:
Stupid audio decision & bad english dub.
2009-11-22 - I should say first that I own the DVD and not the Blu-ray. I was extremely disappointed to not see a high-res chinese audio track on the Blu-ray. I have a fairly high end audio system and when I first got it I would show it off with the Hero DVD. That disc had a chinese track in standard DTS and it sounded incredible, way better than the Dolby Digital track on the same disc. So I was really hoping for even better sound with the Blu-ray.

This very stupid mistake would almost be forgivable if not for two things. 1: The chinese DTS track from the DVD is not on the Blu-ray either. STUPID! 2: The english dub does not feature Jet Li's voice and the emperor's voice is that of an actor I can easily reconize which makes it very distracting. They've also put more emphasis on matching lip movement rather than the emotion in the dialog.

As I said have not bought this Blu-ray yet; although, I may cave in because while the DVD sounds great it does not look great on my HDtv. The worst part about all of this is that Buena Vista does not re-release live-action movies very often. So there's not much hope that they'll fix this stupid mistake for quite some time. Unless this Blu-ray is put out by only Miramax (I didn't do the research to find out).

Movie Is Good
2009-11-09 - The Story line of the movie is good. I didn't realize that I had seen this movie before. Still, it was nice to see it on blue ray.

Maybe just maybe you won't notice the audio difference?
2009-11-02 - The low scores seem to do with the mandarin track being lossy DD. Before you give a low score based on that be absolutely positive a lossless track would've benefited you(i.e., if you're one of the lucky ones to have a high end audio system that cost you thousands and have the golden ears to match it). I point to this Home Entertainment magazine article where only one of the testers was able to distinguish anything beyond 640kbps Dolby Digital.[...]

Amazon won't let me post the link just Google for 'Dolby TrueHD & DTS-HD MA vs. Uncompressed PCM' to find the article.


fantastic audio
2009-10-18 - i was skeptical about purchasing this video on blu-ray because the "house of flying daggers" bd quality was so poor. to my surprise the video quality is very descent and the audio version in english (5.1 dts-hd) is excellent.

Please ignore witless reviews!
2009-10-05 - Some of these reviews made me laugh out loud, they were so ludicrous. Yes, I'm a techno-nerd too, with reference-quality A/V gear. But most of these hapless reviewers are really missing the point. By a mile. If I took this attitude, I'd never go to see a film again, listen to a concert or ever buy another BluRay. Get over it, guys and - by the way - FYI the vast majority of surround sound systems suck anyway- as anyone with the merest knowledge of phsychoacoustics could attest.

So, let's get down to basics and the things that do actually matter. My wife (who is Chinese) and I sat down in front of our Kuro Reference and had a great time. We listened to the 'lowly' 5.1 Putonghua track, of course, and were not bothered one whit.

This is a great wushu epic with charismatic actors, stunning locations, decent CGI and - above all- fabulous cinematography.

And the transfer to BluRay is decent. Not great, but way, way better than the ham-fisted debacle that was 'Flying Daggers'.

What more do you want?

Lighten up, guys!