The Great Wall Movie Review

Written by: Sean Hannon

The Great Wall was directed by Zhang Yimou and stars Matt damon and Jing Tian. It is based on an Ancient Chinese folktale about The Great Wall stopping monsters from plundering the Chinese countryside. The trailers for the film looked campy and it was mostly advertised as your typical action film. To be honest, the movie is interesting in the worst ways. It is one of the first major movies I've seen that directly panders to Chinese audience, and shows Matt Damon and other European outsiders as mean and greedy outsiders.

Overview

Matt Damon and his group of traders are on their way from Europe to China in the search of black powder or gunpowder. But when they stop in Mongolia to camp, they are attacked by a monster who kills most of the party besides Damon and one other. They make it to The Great Wall where they are captured by the Chinese who are intrigued by the monster attack. The attack signals to the Chinese military that monsters that attack every 60 years are coming to besiege the wall early, and they immediately mobilize to defend the wall against large hordes of monsters.

Positives

This movie is funny, not in the intensional way but in a campy or cheesy way. Some of the action shots look cool, and the advanced defences of the wall are intriguing. Otherwise there's nothing much to say about this movie

Negatives

As I’ve said before this film blatantly panders directly to the Chinese audiences, it describes China in the time being more advanced than Europe, more progressive than Europe, and morally superior to Europe. These themes are stated horribly as some of them are just blatantly stated in the dialog. Speaking of dialog, I'm 90% sure all the English dialog was roughly translated from Chinese, a lot of lines are phrased oddly and most of those mistakes are very funny. The plot is not great as there seems to be a lot of major events that when thought about, don't make much sense. Finally the CGI for the monsters looks very outdated which makes the movie even more cheesy and campy.

Overall

It's clear that I have a negative opinion on this movie, and if anything that I've mentioned before in the negative section do not even think of watching this film. One thing which I've mentioned might kill any joy in this movie’s stupidity is the theme of Chinese superiority in this era. It breaks up the action and very quickly becomes obvious and annoying. If you want to have a laugh and are willing to put up with the theme, you should see this film. If not than avoid it like the plague!