Willem Dafore plays another European named Ballard, who has been stuck in the Great Wall trying to collect gunpowder 25 years before. Zhang, who started his career as a cinematographer, has staged several breathtaking combat scenes in the past, but he seems more at home with humans duking it out instead of dragons with eyes in their shoulders. With history already being ignored, it wouldn’t seem that implausible in this environment. One almost wonders if Damon should switch from a bow or a sword to a controller. It certainly doesn’t help that the tao tei look as if they’ve broken out of a Nintendo Wii system. There’s a feeling of “oh, I guess they killed another one.” The sheer number of combatants actually makes the battle scenes numbingly dull. It’s more like the biblical locust plague. Lin’s Unknown order has thousands of members, and they aren’t fighting a mere pack of tao tei.
Those parts of the moral are repeated by the Chinese characters in the film, but the movie itself is a troubling monument to excess. The monster has such a voracious appetite that it eats other tao tei and even itself. It’s ironic that the tao tei is a warning against greed in Chinese mythology. William is an exceptionally good archer, so Commander Lin (Tian Jing) overcomes some of her mistrust of the foreigners and has William and Tovar join her the rest of the defenders. This puts them ahead of some human combatants. The tao tei can communicate over long distances like insects and can learn from mistakes. These critters are so fierce that every able bodied person must fight them. This helps explain why the Great Wall has an overwhelming arsenal of weapons and has both female and male warriors ready to stab, shoot and club any tao tei that dares to near the wall. Nonetheless, they recognize the leg as belonging to a tao tei, and they know the dragon-like creatures, who are roughly the size of a lion, are difficult to kill. When William and Tovar arrive at the Great Wall after running from another set of bandits, the defenders understandably distrust them. William manages to kill the beast and keep its leg as a trophy. After narrowly escaping some bandits, the two wind up being the only survivors when a creature attacks them at night. Novelist Max Brooks ( World War Z), director Ed Zwick ( Glory) and Tony Gilroy ( Michael Clayton) have all contributed to the material, but it’s hard to tell what if anything they’ve contributed.Īs it stands, The Great Wall involves a pair of European mercenaries named William (Matt Damon) and Tovar (Pedro Pascal) who have journeyed for years to obtain gunpowder, which is still unavailable in the West. Character motives are sketchy, and the evocation of Imperial China is gorgeous but baffling.
There are six screenplay and “story by” credits, so the story is a mess. Unfortunately, The Great Wall doesn’t appear to have been directed but is instead clumsily assembled by a committee. To Live was an engrossing look at the cost of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Hero and House of Flying Daggers proved that martial arts movies could be as smart and dramatically satisfying as they are thrilling.
That last sentence might sound like hyperbole, but if you’ve seen any of Zhang’s previous movies, he’s made some amazing films that seem just as outlandish. If director Zhang Yimou had make a film about just the Great Wall itself and had not bothered with lifeless characters and unconvincing special effects, the results would have been superior. Perhaps The Great Wall might have been a better movie if it had one of China’s smaller architectural marvels as a backdrop.