I was looking forward to seeing The Great Wall. There, I said it. Many people have mocked the ridiculous concept of this film, but they need to remove the sticks from their asses. I’m a big fan of the b-movie creature features of the 50s and 60s, so the story of Matt Damon fighting lizard monsters in ancient China is seemingly right up my alley. Unfortunately, the film itself does not live up to the pure gold of that eight-word summary.
Made by Chinese director Yimou Zhang (who I’m not familiar with, but I’m intrigued by his film titled A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop), The Great Wall is a Chinese-American co-production. The problem with designing a film to simultaneously appeal to vastly different cultures is that you must seek the lowest common denominator that both cultures will understand. This has generally become a problem in Hollywood as foreign markets have become more important (hell, the Transformers movies are still being made without care for quality because slapstick and explosions are universally understood concepts). With The Great Wall, one can almost envision the American and Chinese producers offscreen with cliché checklists. Foreigner that slowly gains respect from the native people? Check. Comic-relief sidekick? Check. Stoic warrior leader that slowly comes to trust the foreigner? Check. Coward that redeems himself at the end? Check. Emerging sexual tension between the two leads on both sides? Check. Hero foreigner returns to final battle in the name of honor to help the natives? Check? None of this is done particularly poorly, mind you, but it is purely paint-by-numbers stuff.
The monsters themselves are also disappointing. Created entirely with CGI, they all have essentially the same bland design that evokes horrible memories of the baby Godzillas from the 1998 American movie. For the most part, they operate in massive packs of thousands and this necessitates the use of CGI. However, it is disappointing that no practical effects were used in the few scenes when only a single monster was on screen. Not the worst effects or designs I have ever seen, but again nothing noteworthy. It’s like they asked somebody to design a lizard monster on their computer, looked at the first attempt and went “eh, its good enough.”
The bright spot in the film is the battle scenes, which show the Chinese army defending the wall in massive, choreographed attacks using flaming, spiked cannon balls and divers that jump over the wall with spears and axes. It’s some entertaining, crazy shit and it’s beautifully shot too. It seems like the majority of the thought that went into this movie was devoted to staging these scenes. I did have a nagging thought, though. Considering that the Chinese had just invented gun powder and have a stockpile of grenades, did nobody think that this might be a good time to use them? You’re fighting an invading army of monsters and you’re still saving your explosives for a rainy day? I would be pretty pissed if I jumped into a pile of flesh-eating iguanas with just a sword and then found out that my boss was saving the goddamn grenade launchers for a more serious situation.
I’m having a harder time defending this film than I had defending this film’s concept. I was hoping for a dumb monster movie, but its neither dumb enough or serious enough to justify its existence. The entire film just screams of people going through the motions without particularly giving a shit. I don’t recommend rushing out to see it, but you could watch far worse things if you are bored one afternoon and want to kill some time. To summarize: Meh.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_(film)#/media/File:The_Great_Wall_(film).png
