Launched into fearless flight by means of ropes and winches, they leap from the ramparts as if they're avenging angels, ready to fight the taotie with only their spears.īut the army that holds the wall against these mysterious hordes keeps its greatest weapon in reserve: The black powder can let off fireballs the like of which the benighted Europeans have never seen. Western individualism is represented by Damon's maverick William adventuring to China with his Spanish sidekick, Tovar (Pedro Pascal), in search of black powder, the legendary weapon that might make them both rich.Ĭhinese collectivism, meanwhile, is mainly expressed by huge crowds of impressively choreographed soldiers, including a female troupe of aerial warriors led by the beautiful commander Lin (Jing Tian). Instead, the film creates an effective, if simple, thematic scheme in which the virtues of the East and the West must be united to battle the beast. It's the flat characters and cursory storytelling that let the project down.īut first of all, you can banish all your anti-imperialist anxiety that Damon was going to be playing the mighty whitey rushing off to rescue the benighted Chinese. And under the direction of the Chinese master Zhang Yimou ( Raise the Red Lantern), the visuals are often spectacular, with delightful visions of medieval weaponry and sweeping views of the Chinese landscape sliced in two by that snaking wall. The script, by a team of six Hollywood writers including Tony Gilroy of the Bourne franchise, borrows a legendary beast from Jorge Luis Borges: In his Book of Imaginary Beings, the Argentine writer imagined the zoomorphic taotie figures on Chinese bronzes as two-headed monsters animated by greed. The concept for the film actually has a certain literary flair. He plays a European mercenary single-handedly fighting off gruesome monsters with a bow and arrow, while discovering the superiority of Chinese technology and esprit de corps in a film that offers a satisfying mythological framework for Sino-American relations. So this time, the formula is reversed and it's Matt Damon who is offered as a sop to Western tastes. co-production, which isn't subject to the quota: With a budget reported at $150-million (U.S.), The Great Wall is now the biggest example ever. They weren't particularly well-defined.Īnother approach to penetrating the Asian market is the Chinese-U.S. Committed to expanding global markets in an era of shrinking audiences, Hollywood needs those spots and is increasingly willing to cater to Chinese tastes to secure them: You may have noticed the pair of martial-arts characters inserted into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, for example.

The movie poster says the Great Wall of China is 5,500 miles long and took 1,700 years to build, before asking provocatively 'What were they trying to keep out?' The answer, of course, is foreigners.Įven today, there are strict government quotas on the number of foreign films that can be screened in China.

The great wall movie monster