WASHINGTON — Built over 17 centuries at a staggering length of 13,000 miles, The Great Wall of China was historically constructed for both logical and psychological reasons to keep out invaders and symbolize strength to the world.
But did you know there are also mythical legends that it was built to keep out supernatural beasts?
That’s the premise explored in the new action-fantasy flick “The Great Wall.”
Set during the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD), European mercenaries William (Matt Damon) and Tovar (Pedro Pascal) head East in search of a revolutionary black powder. When their camp is mysteriously ambushed in the middle of the night, they are captured by Chinese soldiers of The Nameless Order, led by General Shao (Zhang Hanyu), Strategist Wang (Andy Lau) and Commander Lin Mae (Tian Jing).
Taken to the Great Wall, William and Tovar find themselves caught in a supernatural battle between the armored human soldiers and extraterrestrial lizard creatures that attack the wall every 60 years. While Tovar plots a secret escape plan with another captured mercenary named Ballard (Willem Dafoe), William gradually earns the trust of Commander Lin and vows to stay and fight with her.
If that plot sounds a little off the wall, let’s break it down in pop-culture terms we can all understand. Imagine Good Will Hunting going Bad Lizard Hunting (How ya like them apples?) with the most Green Monsters on a wall since Fenway Park (wicked pun) and a premise out of left field (I could go all day).
All joking aside, the premise may be bizarre but it’s not unprecedented. After all, the action-fantasy champ “King Kong” (1933) featured a similar giant wall to keep out a beast, while the genre’s most acclaimed trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” (2001-2003) featured many a creature storming the gates.
If you can suspend your disbelief, it’s way more entertaining than it has any right to be. We’ll get to the film’s flaws in a second, but let’s start with the things this zany blockbuster actually gets right.
First, we’re in the hands of a visionary. Chinese director Yimou Zhang is the two-time BAFTA-winning filmmaker behind a handful of nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and Golden Globes: “Ju Dou” (1990), “Raise the Red Lantern” (1991), “To Live” (1994), “Hero” (2002) and “House of Flying Daggers” (2005). The most acclaimed of these was “Hero,” winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
In “The Great Wall,” Zhang offers consistent visual flair, revealing the top of the wall with a dazzling crane shot, while color-coding his armies like a game of Cinema Stratego with red for the arrow-shooting men and blue for the high-flying women. As these warriors bungee down to battle, Zhang’s camera plunges with them to immerse us in the action, as the foggy battlefield nails its jump scares.
When things slow down between the beastly onslaughts, there’s even a beautiful moment where the soldiers let paper lanterns fly (i.e. “Kubo and the Two Strings”) in honor of a fallen comrade. Best of all is the colorful stained-glass windows of a tower during the visually-stunning, albeit chaotic, climax.
Another pleasant surprise is to find that critics’ concerns of whitewashing are greatly exaggerated. Many feared a “white savior” element to casting Matt Damon in a Chinese blockbuster, but the way it plays out actually makes sense in this particular story. This isn’t Damon offensively playing an Asian role like Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) or Emma Stone’s Hawaiian in “Aloha” (2015), he’s a European mercenary seeking black powder surrounded by a mostly Asian cast.
On the flip side, this crossover appeal to the international market is a double-edged sword. While the Chinese-American co-production has already grossed more than $224 million worldwide, it often settles for redundant action simply because combat translates easier across cultures than dialogue.
What’s left is the film equivalent of Hollywood building a wall and making China pay for it. With so much talk of walls in our politics over the past quarter century, there was plenty of room for deeper social commentary, from politicians wanting to tear them down (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,”) to others wanting to build them (“We’re going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it”).
What’s that you say? “King Kong” and “Godzilla” weren’t social commentaries? Yes, yes they were.
“The Great Wall” is a monster movie spectacle that gets more repetitive with each relentless attack. “Bourne” screenwriter Tony Gilroy and “Narcos” scribes Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro do their best to insert variety, such as a thrilling capture of one of the beasts, but the story beats don’t offer that much beyond staving off an attack, recovering, then staving off another attack, only to recover again.
Thus, you won’t be surprised to find Max Brooks in the story credits beside Edward Zwick (“Glory”) and Marshall Herskovitz (“Traffic”). There are several distinct moments where the hoards of lizard beasts scale the wall en masse like the zombies pursuing Brad Pitt in Brooks’ “World War Z” (2013).
As expected from the trailers, the 3D-CGI creatures look more like video game creations than actual, living, breathing creatures from, say, “Alien” (1979) or “Jurassic Park” (1993). If you’re a hard-core gamer, you might dig these creatures, but if you’re more into realism, you might want to stay away.
Regardless, we can all agree that the story logic is head-scratching. It makes sense that a giant meteor could wipe out the dinosaurs here on Earth, but how can aliens hitch a ride on such a meteor to inhabit Earth? Even if you accept that logical leap in the backstory, an even more puzzling question awaits: If it took 17 centuries for mankind to build The Great Wall, how would it stop creatures this relentless?
