The Great Wall and The Mediocre Film

Let me preface this by just saying despite much disbelief I was genuinely excited for this movie. Did I expect a good story: absolutely not. Did I expect a compelling thought piece: not even a tiny bit. Did I woefully overhype fucking Matt Damon fighting Kaiju on the great wall in an ancient Chinese version of Pacific Rim: I was fully.torqued. The disappointment in this movie actually came opposite of what I expected. This may surprise many of you but my letdown is derived from the fact that despite it’s incredibly doofy premise the movie just didn’t do enough. Making a movie with this much absolute nonsense to pull from should have provided an hour and a half of holy shit goofiness that makes huge budget action movies that a five year old could have written so great. Instead what we got was all of the assured bad and none of the possible good. The world was absolutely begging to be able to display a helms deep like battle sequence between a beautiful array of monsters and the mammoth wall adorned with it’s colorful soldiers and archer lined towers. It was there, they had it! The first 30 minutes had primed this movie to be everything I wanted it to be. Upon your first introduction to the wall you’re made immediately aware of it’s massive scale, they killed it. Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal are greeted by hundreds of archers and spearmen staring them down as the camera pans up to this seemingly endless porcupine of spears and arrows that is one section of the structure. You’re introduced to thousands and thousands of beautifully colored soldiers in fantastic armor. They allow your mind to wander as they pan across numerous siege machines, defense mechanisms and gadgets as they explain the roles of all of the occupants of the wall.It isn’t an exaggeration, this shit had me Helms Deep level hype. 

Unfortunately this is right about where my dreams were birthed and subsequently murdered. Every turn taken after the first initial seconds of the battle is the wrong turn. The world development halted, the characters weren’t enough to support it and the monsters grew very very stale. Most people I’ve spoken to have no interest in seeing this to begin with but if for some reason you give a shit about spoilers, this is your warning they’re coming.

• The monsters sucked. The movie was handed the keys to the most unfuckupable motif in cinema. Monster movies rule hard and especially with the budget this film had (the biggest budget Chinese movie ever) the dropping of the ball is inexcusable. If you’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make something look pretty make sure you pay them for it to be creative too. What we got was three types of boring nothingface monsters in the form of dumbass scout things in the thousands, shield monsters who literally just protected the queen and there was maybe like ten and then finally the queen who wasn’t big, scary or even creative. She just looked like a lazy ass flea market knock off toy.  The world is your oyster with this kind of stuff and you have total freedom to do wacky, insane creatures to play in the landscape you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on. I guess they just wanted to keep it grounded so as to not mess up the already “very realistic plot”…
• The monsters weakness. The only thing dumber and less creative than the monsters were the methods used to defeat them. Would you have guessed the monsters weakness was magnets? Jesus. Soooooooo the way they work is that the queen sends out echolocation orders to the infinite pack of same model monster and for some reason if they have a magnet near them it interrupts the signal and they become docile? Whatever, I’ve seen Signs and War of the Worlds. I’m familiar with stupid weaknesses. However, what I can’t excuse is supposedly the Chinese have been fighting these monsters for centuries and literally never considered giving an earnest attempt at killing the queen until Matt Damon sets on a mission to do that. They even say when all hope is lost and the monsters break through the wall that killing the queen will destroy the entire horde. You would think somewhere over the centuries someone would have given it more of a try than just catapulting some rocks at it but nah. It somehow never occurred to them.
• The monsters origin. I realize this is my third bullet specifically about the monsters but there’s a lot of ground to cover on them and I haven’t mentioned that the monsters came from an asteroid that was punishment for the Chinese’s greed. If the universe dolled out asteroids infected with evil multiplicative packs of dogs whenever a world leader got too greedy I highly doubt it would be this single serving in middle of nowhere China and that the monsters would be gracious enough to wait to emerge until a mile long wall was obstructed before flinging themselves into it for centuries.
• The plot was unnecessary. I didn’t have much hope or want for a plot but it would have actually ended up helping a lot considering all the shit I thought I would love about the movie fell flat. What we got was an unwanted love interest for Matt Damon in Tian Jing, Pedro Pascal playing the Red Viper except less consequential and more sidekicky. Then we got tacked on Willem Dafoe who played a stereotypical bad guy with no story, dialogue or arc to back it up. This is a movie that made him long for his glory days as the Green Goblin in Spiderman. The entire plot of the movie is about Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal’s search for gunpowder, a mythical substance that “turns air into fire” and annihilates anything but would never be considered to counter an apocalyptic alien threat until all seemed to be lost and you randomly remember it exists. Their search brings them to the wall where they are captured and forced to watch 20 minutes of uninspired green dogs try to climb up walls just to end up digging through and almost destroying the world. That is until the weapon that’s been the focal point of the three characters stories is finally utilized and hey! The world is saved and evil is vanquished. At the cost of potentially millions of lives, 3 poorly equipped writers, an entire discouraged CG team and an hour and a half of your time.

 

The few things this movie did great.

• Lin Bae. Her costumes were amazing she is amazing. My Wall Crush Wednesday, she put on a decent enough performance with what she was given, had the dopest costumes, was absolutely beautiful and commanded a lot of respect in the movie. That last point is probably the greatest thing about her as the movie did showed admirable restraint in making her the “sexy ninja girl” which I was worried about. You meet her as the leader of an all female battalion of bungie jumping spear warriors (yeah I know whatever) and she later becomes the general, leading the entire war on the whatever the monsters were called. Thing Lord Commander similar to the Nights Watch in Game of Thrones. She was one of maybe 3 intriguing characters in the film and it was nice to see a strong female role written without any of the usual bullshit that comes with it. Never is she doubted but never is she shown as invincible.
• The visuals. I touched on this earlier but this movie was genuinely beautiful to watch. It looks like real time and care was taken with the color choices, camera angles and the surprising variety of costume design and contraptions on the wall. This movie had so much potential to be the badass fortress standoff vs unstoppable army movie it should have been. Don’t watch the whole movie but for some seriously cool fantasy imagery check out the first half hour or so.
• Sparks of creativity. There was some really dumb shit in this movie. At one point they actually torch a good portion of the wall and surrounding country by climbing in makeshift hot air balloons powered by gunpowder whose ascent was quickly stifled by just how goddamn stupid the idea was in the first place, plummeting them back down to earth setting ablaze their own fortress. A surprisingly accurate metaphor for my expectations for this movie. Giving credit where credits due though, it was creative, if the movie had taken more risks like that in places that needed it this could be a totally different outcome.

 

TL;DR. Don’t watch this unless you’re inebriated or bored. It could be a fun watch with friends but it’s really hard to recommend especially since there’s so many better movies in this genre to pick from first. Overall I award this film 1.5 turds out of 5.