The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 1h 44m)

 
Zhang Yimou is a director I not only respect, but greatly admire, with a bold, distinctive and strikingly colourful visual style, and a flair for producing films that cross language barriers and carry strong universal themes, whilst his oeuvre includes two films I count among my favourite (House of Flying Daggers and Hero). His first foray into English language film, sadly, is a curiously underpowered monster vs man romp that feels like a compromise between Western summer blockbuster and wuxai masterpiece and comes up short-whilst it occasionally sparks to life, it never truly produces the necessary explosion of Yimou's singular style.

Before we talk about the film proper, it's necessary to address the Damon in the room. Oh, Matt Damon. Much like Christian Bale in Yimou's 2011 film, Flowers of War,  but with much greater fanfare, your role in this film seems to have been picked out, alongside Scarlett Johansson's turn in the upcoming Ghost in the Shell (and Luc Besson's subpar codswallop brain-venture Lucy) as indicative of Hollywood's continuing issue with casting Asian actors in lead roles in Asian-set or themed films, often taking the role of saviour or hero in otherwise Asian-dominated casts-a point I agree entirely with-were this a story entirely based around people who should be Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, then Matt Damon has no place here (I'll return to this point when I inevitably review Ghost in the Shell, but there are many superb Japanese actresses who would have made a better Major than Johansson). 

However, Damon's character is a fish out of water, a westerner abstracted from the west, placed in a part of the world a western POV would have labelled "Here be Monsters" in the 11th Century, and both he and his companion (played admirably by Chilean actor Pedro Pascal) are, for great chunks of this film either overly passive or painfully out of their depth, particularly whilst the largely Chinese (and of these, a great deal are female) cast deal with the monsters. This is a film which would not have worked without this clash of culture, the clash of the Chinese concept of "trust", and of the group striving for a greater good against the individual and money-fixated western mercenary. There is also, unfortunately, the bankablity of a western actor to a western audience, and in the case of The Great Wall, in the shared Chinese/American production's focus upon the prestige of a major American actor in their film. Do I think that this film would have been better with an all-Chinese cast, and a more Chinese-focused story? Absolutely, but this choice cannot be placed purely as a case of cut-and-dried whitewashing.

The Great Wall begins, as, unfortunately this type of film does tend to, with text; I do not generally have an issue with the text explanations opening films (heck, it can cut down tremendously on in-film explanation)-but the age and length of the Great Wall don't really come into the film much, given that it focuses on a small section (seriously, have these monsters never considered attacking anything other than a 10 or so kilometre chunk of the wall?), and the fact the monsters have been attacking for a while is referred to about twenty minutes in. From this introduction, we're introduced to Matt Damon (the English mercenary, William) and co, who are after this film's macguffin, black powder-having set off from Europe with 20 men, they're now whittled down to five.
After a run-in with bandits, followed by a mysterious creature that kills three of Will's men, only to be dispatched by Will himself, the remaining duo of Will and Spaniard Tovar are hounded by the bandits, and come face to face with the titular wall-if nothing else, the introduction to the Wall, as much a character as any human actor, is suitably imposing, and one of the few times that Yimou's style really breaks out of the blockbuster box.

From here, we're introduced to the generals of the various colour coded forces, from archers (red) and heavy infantry (silver) to the blue-clad and entirely female corp under Commander Lin (played by Jing Tian), who, on finding that Will has single-handedly killed one of the monsters is first incredulous then intrigued . Lin...is the best thing about this film, not just because the film makes her more of an action star that Damon is for great chunks of the action, including giving her the killing blow of the film's demoument, but places her, after the death of her superior, in overall charge of the force defending the wall-whilst her character is weakened a little by an oddly muted romance with Will, and the fact that she, like her entire corp, is armoured in blue, bizarrely Power Ranger breast-hugging armour.

The rest of the Chinese cast are equally good, if slightly underwritten, aside from Wang, the group's strategist, played by Andy Lau, who acts as a good foil to Lin. More to this film's credit, much of the dialogue between the command group and their troops is in subtitled Chinese, with Wang or Lin translating for Will and Tovar. From here, with Will and Tovar forced into the thick of the action, we're taken through the wall in action, with the female warriors leaping off the wall to spear monsters, crossbows and archers peppering them and even catapults launching huge flaming boulders-again, with the movements of huge groups of colour-coded groups, Yimou's visual style floats to the surface. Will and Tovar finally join the fray, prove their worth and the monsters retreat.

At this point, their origin is revealed-the monsters (Taotie) are aliens from a mysterious glowing mountain a few dozen miles away, are led by a queen, who is shielded by larger monsters, and fed by the smaller foot-troops with the Wall the only thing between them and the capital. Meanwhile Willem Defoe's character, Ballard, a knight and fellow seeker of the black powder sees a plan to escape with the two Westerners, and becoming a hero, but Will is increasingly torn between his old mercenary ways and making a new start as a hero on the Wall. Wang works out that the piece of meteor that Will carries may be the way to disrupt the communication between the Taotie and the Queen-promptly capturing one, in another well-paced and misty set-piece battle, they prove the theory, only for the monster to be carted away.

However, a bigger issue quickly presents itself-the attacks have been a distraction for the Taoties to dig straight through the ground beneath the wall, and worst is to come with Ballard and Tovar stealing a large number of the black powder weapons most useful against the monsters. William is thrown into prison, and the remaining wall forces chasing after the Taoties via dangerous balloons they converge on the capital. William is brought out of prison and joins the chase with a young warrior and Wang, coming to the rescue of Lin-they hatch a plot to destroy the Queen and render the rest of the army useless, and despite the young warrior and Wang falling along the way, manage to blow up the queen, save China and the world. Will, now a hero, is allowed to go on his way with, surprisingly, Tovar, recaptured after Ballard blows himself up, rather than the black powder to keep him company.  

The Great Wall is best thought of as an interesting disappointment-as the most expensive Chinese film ever made, it neither really seems overly Chinese, with wuxai-ish touches few and far between, asid from a few well-choreographed fights and a couple of beautifully composited shot, not overly Westernised, with the action dialed back in many places. This film either needed a more wuxai feeling to its cinematography or to go the whole blockbuster hog, but sits, awkwardly, between the two. As a result, it sadly falls through the gap between the two-by no means is it terrible, and considering the track-record for Western led films set in China, it's by far the most hopeful and most Chinese-influenced, but compared to the rest of Zhang Yimou's filmography, it's a bland, rather cookie-cutter action movie-the fact that he has made films with many times the gravitas and popularity of The Great Wall, not only in China but in the world in general, on a fraction of its $150 million budget indicates that, despite its huge scale, it's an oddly bloated and soulless film.

Rating: Neutral.