The movie was Hero, a 2002 movie starring Jet Li. I tended to get a different feeling from that line. The nameless protagonist had asked for calligraphy from

The movie was Hero, a 2002 movie starring Jet Li. I tended to get a different feeling from that line. The nameless protagonist had asked for calligraphy from his opponent. However, the protagonist did not ask for any of the existing ways to write "Sword", but rather for a new expression of it. When it was written, the protagonist spent a sleepless night examining it, learning every detail and every symbol behind the writing of this single word. It is in this context that the king interrupts the story and says how silly it is to have so many ways of writing it. Rather than being a statement of how it should be, I took it to be a statement of ignorance on the part of the king. The king did not understand how there could be subtleties in words, and wished only for simplification of the language, rather than looking for the meaning behind existing words.