Review of The Great Wall (2016) by Ian G — 04 Mar 2017

The Great Wall was supposed to act as a crossover film for legendary Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou of Curse of the Golden Flower and Hero fame, recruiting Matt Damon and Legendary Pictures to finance this Max Brooks novel of historic fictional iguana type dragons from scaling the Great Wall and invading China's capital and eventually the world.

Unfortunately once you make it about halfway through the proceedings you can totally tell the film was a really big battle and lost its direction more than likely due to contradictory intentions as to who this film was for and started suffering from the Tony Gilroy/reshoots curse.

The first act Damon and Pedro Pascal of Game of Thrones along with a supporting role for William Dafoe happened to be more in the background with the Asian cast members being forefront pushing the story forward primarily in Chinese with english subtitles and the Yimou florishes, from a House of Flying Daggers cup arrow trip to show off Damons archery, to an amazing first battle against the invading hordes with bungee swordswomen diving off the side of the fortress.

Once the general bites the dust it becomes evident very quickly the writers weren't sure which way they wanted to take things without going down the route of Damon going down the route of white saviour leading the charge which is a huge cliche that the studio had issues with leading up to the release.

That and a final act which was just an orgie of CG ripping off of another Max Brooks property World War Z which the hive dinosaur thingies climbing walls and any sort of barricade in front of them made things just utterly ridiculous given some of the cool concepts in the opening.

That plus the appearance of the weather balloons war machines in that final act as well out of nowhere made some of the logic breakdown even more. Disappointing given the potential with the talent involved :(.