Directed by Zhang Yimou ( Raise the Red Lantern, Curse of the Golden Flower), the $150–$200 million (plus marketing and distribution costs) Sino-American epic The Great Wall grossed $334 million worldwide. He is, to put a fine point on it, the wrong actor for this role.ĭamon himself has been trying to skirt the “ whitewashing” charge by arguing that his character, William Garin, is an English mercenary – an odd claim considering the opening titles announce the story as a “legend,” meaning the role could have been played by anybody. His charisma operates at a low hum, like he’s sauntering his way around the action, instead of punching his way through it. His body is constrained by his armor and his soft, suburban face suggests the annoyed look of a man struggling to dislodge his sports bottle from underneath the passenger seat of his Dodge Caravan. The real problem is that Damon looks dreadfully ill at ease in this role, as if conscripted by the Chinese government to appear in the film in lieu of prison. Their complaints, ignorant of the fact that Damon’s popularity in both China and America was a hedge against financial failure, were misdirected. Upon learning that the very American Matt Damon would play the lead, Sino audiences feared The Great Wall was about a brave, white hero saving the Chinese from angry monsters laying siege to their country’s most recognizable landmark. The film’s troubled end was foreshadowed by its troubled beginning.
Zhang’s gifts, alas, aren’t required for something as silly as The Great Wall, an overstuffed and, at times, nonsensical 12th-century monster movie that fails to announce China as a major Hollywood rival or advance concepts of collectivism and individual sacrifice. He’s now known primarily as a director of wuxia films like Hero (a previous “most expensive film” in Chinese history) and House of Flying Daggers, action fantasies where the swooping and swooning of characters in battle are, at times, matched in intensity by the swooping and swooning of characters in emotional extremis. What Are the BAFTA Awards? Hollywood-on-the-Thames + David A. A depressing thought considering 2017 is the 30th anniversary of Zhang’s debut film, Red Sorghum, which launched a magnificent run of emotionally opulent dramas including Ju Dou (the first Chinese film ever nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar) and Raise the Red Lantern. The revered Fifth Generation auteur hasn’t had a sizable international hit since House of Flying Daggers in 2004. Victim Zhang Yimou?Īnd yet the real victim if The Great Wall ultimately underperforms, the one film lovers should care about, is its Chinese director, Zhang Yimou.
There is, in other words, much riding on the performance of The Great Wall, as a web of corporations, production companies, movie theater chains, and financiers in both countries sweat out critical reaction and box office results.
Hollywood is willing to help if it ultimately leads to the release of more of its films in the tightly controlled Chinese market, currently the second largest in the world. In this divisive age, when countries are turning inward with a nationalist, xenophobic fervor, it’s comforting to know that the United States and China, their relationship mercurial and wary, can work together and, in the spirit of cooperation and unity, make a terrible movie.Ī co-production between Legendary East (the Chinese arm of Burbank, California-based, Legendary Entertainment) and China Film Group, The Great Wall is reportedly the most expensive film ever shot in China, a nation with aspirations to make films that rival Hollywood in their scope and success.