The Great Wall is a new action flick set in China, directed by a Chinese director who had previously worked in small Chinese dramas like Raise the Red Lantern and art-house kung-fu movies like Hero (which I liked) and House of Flying Dagger (which I did not). Now he’s working on China’s biggest budget flick ever – a great big dumb action flick about the Chinese army defending the rest of the country from lizard dog gremlin dragon dinosaur alien things from space (or something).
The big controversy of this movie is that they hired Matt Damon (and Pedro Pascal and Willem Defoe) to play Europeans who stumble upon the Wall in their attempts to find and trade for Chinese black (gun) powder. The concern (or outrage) is that this is a White Savior roll and, to a limited degree, it kind of us. But really Damon just plays the audience surrogate – the character who wanders into a story so they have the chance to explain the story to the audience. But if he’d been in the movie or not, they’d have had the same big dumb movie about killer lizard dog gremlin dinosaur alien things from space. The Chinese production hired Damon to put an international face that can sell tickets and not be relegated to art house obscurity outside of China like the director’s previous movies.
So the actual movie is about The Great Wall and how it was built to defend China from both real things and legends… and this is one of those legends (says the opening text crawl in an attempt to ensure us that the movie knows its being silly). When Damon and Pascal wander the beautifully colorful red desert of China and stumble on the Great Wall and its color-coded army of the Unnamed Order, they fall into a story going back thousands of years. After an asteroid strikes a mountain, lizard dog gremlin dragon dinosaur alien things spill out and attack the Chinese countryside every sixty years. The Great Wall was built and the Nameless Order and their colorful armored warriors defend it.
I mention the color-coded army because, if there’s any one thing the director knows how to do, is film beautiful movies with a sumptuous use of colors. This movie is really beautiful to look at. There’s a great use of costumes, some very nice location shooting, and actual sets – and then there’s a lot CGI walls, cities, and rampaging hordes of lizard dog gremlin dinosaur things. It’s not bad CGI but it’s not state-of-the-art either – but I suspect just as much budget went into costumes and extras as went into visual FX.
Besides the Western stars, the movie also has a lot of speaking roles for Eastern (probably all Chinese) actors. I do not recognize any of them but I imagine they are big stars back home. Special recognition to Tiang Jing as Commander Lin, a female hero who wears blue armor and flings herself off the wall on a bungee cord to stab lizard dog gremlin dragon dinosaur aliens. She’s really good and is absolutely beautiful herself in her immaculate blue armor. Happily, and to the movie’s credit, she doesn’t fall madly in love with Matt Damon.
I said this movie is dumb and it largely is – it’s just an excuse for great big battles with dubious strategies. Big dumb movies aren’t all bad and this one isn’t – I was never bored and, while there was questionable logic, it wasn’t egregiously stupid. It helps it didn’t portray itself as an accurate depiction of anything other than being able to put a spectacle on screen. The action is fine – it’s certainly a BIG action flick and sometimes the action is hard to follow, but it usually stays on track. It’s a little shaky but it overall holds firm.
So, yeah, the movie is a big, loud, beautiful looking action flick. It’s hardly a movie you need to run out to see and it’s hardly the biggest offender of the year. It is just a decent enough action flick that the Chinese film industry needs to do well to justify its expense. I’d say see it if the trailers looked good and you want to see a desperate battle on the Great Wall against an army of lizard dog gremlin dragon dinosaur aliens from space. You know if that sounds fun to you – and if it sounds fun, you’ll have a decent time.
Score: 77