And for anyone in the audience that doesn’t quite pick up on that, Lin Mae makes it very clear that the Chinese provide the example from which he must learn: “We fight for more than food or money … we fight for each other.” William begins as a thief, and his obvious hero’s journey is toward something more noble and sympathetic. “Have you ever seen anything like it? Incredible!” “Look at this army,” he marvels to Tovar. They’re color-coordinated, in sync in all their motions, acrobatic, great drummers, technologically advanced, and entirely devoted to the cause. But his impressive archer skills are but a trifle compared to the power and skill of the Chinese army. William is a killer with the bow and arrow, so he proves quite useful during the first wave of attacks. And here’s the craziest part: Time’s up, they’re attacking now! They’re told the truth: The Great Wall was built to keep out a gigantic hoard of mutating monsters that attack every 60 years. There’s some in the brigade who want to execute William and Tovar, but their story about the monster buys them some time. The language gap is bridged by the Lin Mae (Tian Jing), the brigade’s second-in-command she was taught English by another European, a weasley guy named Ballard (Willem Dafoe). Luckily, they’d set up camp right beyond the Great Wall, and are taken in by the Chinese army brigade based in one of its outposts. One night, they’re attacked by some vicious monster, and by the time William can kill the thing, he has only one companion left, the wise-cracking Tovar (Pedro Pascal). The trip is exhausting and dangerous, and by the time the movie opens, only a few men have survived. Keeping in mind that we’re dealing with historical fantasy, here’s the setup: Damon’s character, William, leads a team of white men from Europe on an expedition east, to find and plunder a mysterious and elusive black powder that promises to make them rich (spoiler alert: it’s gunpowder). Incidentally, Dalian Wanda also owns 20 percent of the world’s movie theaters and is run by Wang Jianlin, the richest man in Asia and one of the most powerful people in China. The Great Wall may be a period action movie starring another white man on the surface, but it’s really a preview of a near-future in which China, soon to be the world’s largest movie market, has gained control over mainstream corporate Hollywood.īelow, you will find spoilers for The Great Wall, which was directed by Zhang Yimou, co-produced by the state-run China Film Group and Legendary Entertainment, the American studio that was recently bought by Chinese mega-conglomerate Dalian Wanda. Instead of invading a foreign culture and “sanitizing” it for American audiences, Damon winds up functioning as Hollywood clickbait. Though Matt Damon is the nominal protagonist in the new movie The Great Wall, it turns out that, after months of controversy, his character isn’t exactly an agent of whitewashing.
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