The battles he sets up are color-coordinated marvels, where warriors perform acrobatic stunts and other miracles with curious grace and elegance. Zhang orchestrates dazzling feats here, all within a construct of a Hollywood blockbuster. In between William’s struggle to be a better person, he becomes witness to a grandeur that feels alien in a dumbed-down narrative of humanity versus computer-generated monsters. There are times when The Great Wall has something defiant to say against Hollywood and the kind of culture it represents.
The story, written by Max Brooks and white-men-saving-a-foreign-land experts Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz ( The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond ) is lavish schlock, a monster feature that is desperately embellished by faux history and exoticized culture. That opportunity to be good happens when he and his standard-issue sidekick and comic relief Pero Tovar (Pedro Pascal) end up fighting in a war for survival between China and otherworldly beasts. Mostly brooding – having survived a tough childhood and decades fighting wars for those who can afford him – he is the staple Hollywood hero, the man with a hard past who is ripe for the stereotypical change of heart. William Garin (Matt Damon) has travelled all the way from Europe to China in search of the mythical black powder. The movie is blessed with brazen pageantry and magic, but, most of the time, it’s riddled with fluff and fillers.
The Great Wall is set in a time in history when gunpowder was “black powder that turns air into fire” and China needed to build a monumental wall – not to keep barbarians out, but to protect its capital from a horde of vicious but intelligent monsters.
It seemingly exemplifies what the entire film would essentially be: an unwieldy but thought-provoking marriage of Hollywood’s urge to oversimplify spectacle and director Zhang Yimou’s raging obsession to overly adorn it. The Great Wall opens with an incoherently shot horse chase through a spare but beautiful landscape of subtle greens, browns, and yellows.
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