Wednesday, November 1, 2017.
The Great Wall
starring Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Andy Lau, Zhang Hanyu and Wang Junkai
screenplay by Carlo Bernard
directed by Zhang Yimou
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
The Great Wall was dumb, but lots of fun, so I watched it three or four times. It’s a monster film - monsters from space - and a blockbuster action tale. Matt Damon plays William Garrin, a European mercenary who travels the length of Asia with a group of other mercenaries to find Black Power (gunpowder) and return it to Europe during the late Middle Ages. By the time they reach China their band has been whittled down to just two by marauding bandits - Garrin and his Spanish friend Tovar (Pedro Pascal). When they stumble into China they reach the Great Wall, manned by The Nameless Order under the command of General Shao (Zhang Hanyu). But this is nothing like the Great Wall that we know from history, from pictures and from the Discovery Chanel. This is a giant, 100-meter tall wall built to keep out monsters that wake from hibernation every 60 years and attack the Middle Kingdom. The Nameless Order has developed some fantastic weaponry, skills and tactics for battling the swarming aliens, whose wake from dormancy coincides with Garrin and Tovar’s arrival. Garrin and Tovar display unusual stamina and fighting talent and they endear themselves to their Chinese captors despite their obvious barbarism and backwardness. In the film China rightly comes off as the more civilized, ancient, wealthy and developed society - a treasure unknown to Europeans of the time.
I often tell people that the Great Wall of China is not at all a giant wall by ancient Chinese standards - that ancient Chinese were giants, so the wall was actually just a normal-sized wall to them. The joke doesn’t work if I extend it to the incredible dimensions of the Wall in this film.
This is a Chinese film, but it was made with Hollywood production values, not the usual cheap and crappy Chinese methods, so it was pretty good. It was ambitious, big and well done, even with the alien monsters.