To walk to the end of a narrow beam 50 feet off the ground and leap off relying on your comrades to catch you and pull you back requires trust and commitment - something William hasn’t got much use for. The Great Wall is hardly the first film to suggest that Westerners or Europeans have lost a sense of cultural identity or belonging that shapes one’s sense of purpose and duty, that this sense of identity can still be found in other cultures, or that disenfranchised Westerners can reclaim a sense of purpose by connecting with other cultures. Their tactic involves something that for convenience has been called bungee jumping, a less than entirely accurate term. Is there no expiration date on that one?Ģ9-year-old Jing Commander Lin Mae of the Nameless Order’s all-female Crane Troop, the most flamboyant of the order’s divisions. I’m pretty sure I strained something in my head rolling my eyes too hard when someone pointed out the Tao Tie queen and explained how the individual soldiers are helpless without her. The pattern of the Tao Tie assault on the wall, which is simply swarming it in sufficient numbers to become a surging heap of monsters jumping on one another’s backs, directly echoes World War Z, based on the novel by Max Brooks, who shares a story credit for The Great Wall. (If there’s something vaguely orcish about the look of the Tao Tie, if not their anatomy - and for that matter something elvish or otherwise Middle-Earthy about some of the Nameless Order’s armor and weapons - it probably reflects the influence of New Zealand’s Weta Workshop, which did design, production and effects work.) “What god made these?” asks Pero after their first encounter with the Tao Tie. Is there no expiration date on that one?Īlas, the monsters themselves - reptilian predators called Tao Tie - are pretty generic slavering CGI beasties, although some effort has been made to incorporate the taotie motif from classical Chinese bronze work into the design of their heads. Dafoe plays Ballard, a European prisoner of the Nameless Order who, like William, came in search of black powder a quarter century earlier.
By the time he reaches the Great Wall, only Pascal’s Pero Tovar is still with him. Among other things, there’s also a climactic sequence set in a stained-glass windowed tower that’s lit like no other action sequence I’ve ever seen.ĭamon plays a European mercenary named William who has come to China with a rapidly shrinking group of companions searching for legendary explosive “black powder” that the Chinese reportedly have and Europeans definitely want. The Nameless Order combine a level of superhuman discipline and acrobatic combat acumen comparable to Peter Jackson’s elves with flamboyant color coordination by division reminiscent of the color-coded armies in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. Visually, at least, Zhang fills the screen with color and grace and energy, a welcome contrast to the visual leadenness of so many Hollywood blockbuster-style films.
That doesn’t make it worse than a typical Hollywood spectacle. If that makes The Great Wall sound less like a cross-cultural artistic collaboration than a corporate-driven commodity with a whiff of nationalistic propaganda, well, bingo.
Like Chinese chefs in America in the early 20th century with one menu for Chinese patrons and a second Westernized menu to lure in American patrons, The Great Wall’s Chinese backers want to craft a film that’s Western enough to draw the crowd that might show up for, say, a Planet of the Apes movie to a spectacle about a elite Chinese fighting unit called the Nameless Order that defends China’s Great Wall against a horde of nasty monsters who could destroy the world if they breach the wall. Visually, at least, Zhang fills the screen with color and grace and energy, a welcome contrast to the visual leadenness of so many Hollywood blockbuster-style films.ĭamon’s character is patently European in conception more importantly, China wants a big Hollywood star in the role as much as Hollywood does.