‘The Great Wall’ review: Stunning pageantry, humdrum adventure

The Great Wall opens with an incoherently shot horse chase through a spare but beautiful landscape of subtle greens, browns, and yellows. It seemingly exemplifies what the entire film would essentially be: an unwieldy but thought-provoking marriage of Hollywood’s urge to oversimplify spectacle and director Zhang Yimou’s raging obsession to overly adorn it.

 

Fluff and fillers

The Great Wall is set in a time in history when gunpowder was “black powder that turns air into fire” and China needed to build a monumental wall – not to keep barbarians out, but to protect its capital from a horde of vicious but intelligent monsters. The movie is blessed with brazen pageantry and magic, but, most of the time, it’s riddled with fluff and fillers. 

William Garin (Matt Damon) has travelled all the way from Europe to China in search of the mythical black powder. 

Mostly brooding – having survived a tough childhood and decades fighting wars for those who can afford him – he is the staple Hollywood hero, the man with a hard past who is ripe for the stereotypical change of heart. That opportunity to be good happens when he and his standard-issue sidekick and comic relief Pero Tovar (Pedro Pascal) end up fighting in a war for survival between China and otherworldly beasts. 

The story, written by Max Brooks and white-men-saving-a-foreign-land experts Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond) is lavish schlock, a monster feature that is desperately embellished by faux history and exoticized culture.

 

 

Flagrant extravaganza 

However, it’s not all that bad.

There are times when The Great Wall has something defiant to say against Hollywood and the kind of culture it represents. In between William’s struggle to be a better person, he becomes witness to a grandeur that feels alien in a dumbed-down narrative of humanity versus computer-generated monsters.

Zhang orchestrates dazzling feats here, all within a construct of a Hollywood blockbuster. The battles he sets up are color-coordinated marvels, where warriors perform acrobatic stunts and other miracles with curious grace and elegance. Sure, the sequences get bloody and noisy, but the film never really lets go of what seems to be a very ritualistic treatment of violent escapism.

It is certainly a breath of fresh air from the unabashed destruction that Hollywood has fetishized ever since it became enamored with superheroes and larger-than-life deviations from reality. Zhang contributes to the tradition of Hollywood epic production elements of discipline and style, the same way the Chinese army contributes to faithless William a conscience for country. 

Beleaguered by wasteful plot

It still doesn’t work entirely.

The Great Wall is still obviously beleaguered by a plot that wastes opportunities for real drama and intrigue all for the sake of longer special effects-driven battles.

However, there are real joys here, moments of astounding beauty that momentarily force you out of all the immaturity, making you wish that there was more to the spectacle than the mundane story of a man and his fight with both literal and figurative monsters. – Rappler.com

 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass. Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.