The vicious Tao Teis aren’t much more memorable, despite being impressively rendered and bred from the usual Lord Of The Rings/Games Workshop monster farm - the only significant design twists being Chinese-style designs on their foreheads and having eyes on their shoulders. A conversation about his past comes across as a tacked-on attempt to make him seem dark and set up his potential redemption but really, he’s not whitewashing he’s just grey-dull. William is not presented as a white knight, rather a mercenary caught in the chaos. These are more cause for complaint than the “whitewashing” Damon’s casting supposedly represents. Instead, Chinese cultural clichés abound, from speeches about working together to help the greater cause to Olympic-level gymnastics.
The film was trailed as a cultural mash-up but, being set and filmed in China, the casting of Damon, Pedro Pascal and Willem Dafoe (whose character, Ballard, seems there purely to explain how Commander Lin learned English) is the only element representing the West. Via a witheringly lazy plot device - a guard has lost the key to a cell - they end up getting caught up in the combat. William and his fellow fighter-for-hire Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are poking around the Chinese border in search of valuable “black powder” when they run into an army deployed on the Great Wall to defend China from monsters. Matt Damon plays William, a mercenary soldier whose accent suggests he’s from Ireland, or has at least spent a lot of time swigging Guinness in Irish bars. It’s also the most epic project fêted Chinese director Zhang Yimou has taken on since he directed the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, as well as his first English-language film. It is the biggest-ever China-Hollywood co-production, the most expensive film shot entirely in China, and arrives at a time when the global industry is increasingly facing towards the East. As is perhaps fitting for a film based onĪ 13,000-mile-long stone structure, The Great Wall bears a huge weight of expectation.
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