(Oh yeah, one other thing: I'm really only guessing that Damon is doing an Irish accent.With his grand, globe-conquering adaptation of JRR Tolkein’s genre-defining trilogy, Peter Jackson dragged fantasy into the digital age, managing beyond all the odds to make it at least semi-cool in the process. One other flaw: The dragons look dumb and digital, and we are now two decades deep into the “infinite CGI orcs/bugs/zombies/whatever swarming the battlefield” effect that makes action sequences into expensive video game reenactments with only scale and no stakes. (All the genre pastiche doesn’t yield the kind of absurdist humor that energized the neglected genre tweaker Reign of Fire.) Instead of a giddy mash-up of genres, it lists toward the generic. The film isn’t humorless, but the jokes are faute de mieux, and kind of stapled on. His commitment is so thorough that he neglects to capture the particle of silliness shared by every one of the films he uses as source material. In a way, it seems Zhang may not have been the ideal director for it, because despite his stunning dexterity with the human elements of the action sequences, his mastery of choreographed movement along every axis (the film is worth seeing for the Crane Corps-the all-female brigade of acrobatic warriors who jump off the wall to spear the giant lizard enemy, only to be hoisted back up in a nick of time-alone), he doesn’t appear to have noticed that the story he’s telling is completely ludicrous. The flaw with The Great Wall is that it isn’t fun. WHAT? You never told me Willem Dafoe was in this thing, too! Universal They are prepared to die in the service of their country, while he is just a lowly bow for hire. If anything, he is the one who is transformed by his time among the Chinese soldiers with the exquisitely designed Battle of the Planets-style uniforms. Before long, the prisoner discovers what the wall and the astonishingly well-trained Nameless Order stationed on it are there to defend against: the Tao-Tei, a plague of nearly invincible, human-eating dragon creatures that swarm the wall in an effort to gain entry to China’s interior, where the food supply will be boundless, thus allowing them to conquer the planet.Īnd, for what it’s worth-MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT STOP READING IF YOU CARE ABOUT THAT KIND OF THING, IF YOU’RE EVEN STILL READING, ANYWAY-despite becoming a useful ally because he’s so brave and keen with a bow and arrow, Damon does NOT save the day, does NOT show the savages anything about being a great warrior, and does NOT evince the transcendent, White Man’s Burden-y nobility that marks the heroes of films like Dances with Wolves or The Blind Side or A Time to Kill. When the teaser trailer was released last summer, actor Constance Wu accused the film of “perpetuating the racist myth that only a white man can save the world.” And because life is the way it is now, she was joined by a huge chorus of fellow truth sayers.ĭamon plays an Irish mercenary who is captured while scavenging in the land near the Great Wall of China for gunpowder, some time during the Song Dynasty. It was hard to say which because only about 90 seconds of the film and a poster image were then available. Or worse: playing someone of another ethnicity. Instead, they decided that it was a clear case of "whitewashing," a(nother) film about a white savior-in this case Matt Damon-intervening in an international ethnic context that should not require him. People took up arms against The Great Wall without having seen it, without knowing what it was about, without looking into it at all. The new film by the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou came to my attention the way most things do these days: people complaining about it on the internet. Join PNB for a timeless tale of holiday adventure performed by PNB’s amazing dancers and orchestra.
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