A Better Tomorrow (Chinese: 英雄本色 The True Colors of Heroes) is a 1986 Hong Kong action film directed by John Woo, and starring Ti Lung, Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun-fat. The film is a real classic one as it had a profound influence on the Hong Kong film industry, and later on an international scale. It credited with setting the template for the heroic bloodshed genre, which was considerably influential in Hong Kong action cinema, and later Hollywood.
The film tells a Jianghu story of Hong Kong in the 1980s, a grey utopia intertwined with violence and romance-Song Zihao, Mark, and Song Zijie brought together the conflicts between brotherhood, reflecting their own different frustrations, failures, repentances and revenges. In this story about brotherhood, there is morality, personal heroism, which is the truest portrayal of Hong Kong in the 1980s.
In "The True Colors of Heroes", John Woo skillfully used the characteristics of colonial culture to combine the free and easy appearance of foreign heroes with the perseverance of local heroes to shape the two main characters of Song Zihao (played by Ti Lung) and Xiao Ma (played by Zhou Yunfa), In the brotherly friendship between the two, added a feeling of helplessness, vicissitudes and romance. Brother Hao and Xiao Ma belong to the underworld and should not be included in the social moral order. However, Wu Yusen uses the image of such social rebels to win the audience's approval with their lonely struggle or deep male friendship. Wu Yusen's "The True Colors of Heroes" does not only give the audience the sensational stimulation of the appearance but uses the heroic images of these evil heroes to dig out the characters' multi-level and complex psychology and turn it into a modern urban tragedy. As Hong Kong film critic Shi Qi said: "This kind of violence in "The True Colors of Heroes" is not new, but the best thing about "The True Colors of Heroes" is that the frustrations, revenge, and contradictions of several heroes are written completely. Heroes are mainly to impress the audience with emotion. As for its box office success, it needs to be viewed from a social perspective. It fits the current mentality of Hong Kong society, that is, in the face of the gloomy prospects, we begin to have a kind of' Self-pity is not so naive, I believe this is a simple world, even if the younger generation is not mature, they are sophisticated.”
In addition, the movie’s wonderful shooting scenes and classic lines are also very attractive. In the world of violent aesthetics of male friendship, it conveys to us a universal value-no matter how bad the world is, as long as we have ourselves Stick to your own principles, and the world will not collapse.
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