The lifestyle was one of curation. You didn't just watch Hero ; you traded it. At LAN parties, you’d copy the file to a friend’s external hard drive—a process taking 15 minutes over USB 1.1. You’d argue over which rip group had better sync (was it "DMT" or "VCDQuality"?).
The film uses a non-linear "unreliable narrator" structure. A nameless warrior (Jet Li) recounts to the King of Qin how he defeated three legendary assassins: Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung).