Review of The Great Wall (2016) by Meritcoba — 21 Nov 2017

This is a movie that pairs spectacular visuals and well done choreography with a weak story and shallow characters. But let's not go into that, but instead let's have a look at what sixty years of preparation for the eventful onslaught has given the defenders. For the Chinese defenders know that every sixty years these monsters make an attack and once that succeeds the whole world is at their feet.. eh claws.

Your enemy is a reptilian dog hybrid that is the size of a draft horse. It comes with claws, teeth and a thick hide, can stand an amazing amount of punishment and is suicidally loyal to their queen. One such monster can easily take out a group of well-trained and armed humans. The creatures have however a few severe weaknesses: killing their queen will stop them from functioning, confronting them with magnets will make them docile and hitting their eyes is an instant kill. And the defenders have one big advantage: they have gunpowder at their disposal.

So armed with knowledge about a weakness for magnets the Chinese defenders neglect to send out people all over the world to find magnets or even use the one magnet that stopped the monsters in a previous assault. Instead they use ineffectual methods until saved by this one random traveler who is carrying around a massive magnetic stone that serves no purpose to him and is there only to be delivered into the hands of the Chinese as a lapis ex Machina. And even when the Chinese are aware of the stone's effect on the monsters no messengers are send out to the far corners of the empire to collect whatever stones can be found. To add insult to injury, they even take away the one stone from the wall to show it to the emperor. And what happened to that stone that saved the day sixty years before? And why was it not examined back then?

The queen is the Achilles heel and the defenders only make a half hearted attempt to take her out. She is protected by a group of special monsters that can create a kind of shield to protect her from attacks, which is put up exactly the few times the defenders make an attempt to kill her.

She gets bombarded once and then when that defensive shield is put up they give up. Conveniently at the end of the movie the shield is put down to give Matt Damon a window of opportunity even when the queen knows someone is firing at her. And this several times over. Yes, these monsters have become smarter, as the movie has it, but only by a margin as compared to humans.

And this shows again the sheer stupidity of the defenders. They have had sixty years to prepare for the onslaught and could have created a massive supply of gunpowder weapons aimed to take out the queen. -And note that even a few arrows with gunpowder are apparently very effective against the monsters -. Couple this with oil canisters and naphtha flame throwers they could have killed her by blowing her up or burning her to death. But instead they rely on arrows, swords and spears. It isn't that the monsters have become smarter, the humans have become dumber.

But even if they did not possess gunpowder and magnets then it is baffling what preparations they made in sixty years. For instance the monsters are apparently able to scale the wall. So why put up a flat wall that can easily be scaled instead of equipping the wall with defensive measures against scaling such as barbs that point downwards? Why is the wall not equipped with extensions as to rain down boiling water or fire? Why are the ballistae put on top of the wall but not on level with the monsters so as to have them fire in a level trajectory optimizing the chance of hitting something? Why is the foreground of the wall not used to create obstacles, pits, stakes, traps and a moat instead of allowing the monsters free range of that area? Even putting up beams spaced out to allow room for humans but to narrow for these hulking brutes would have broken up their attack and allow the defenders protection.

Perhaps it is because the wall, as cool as it looks, was not made to defend against these monsters but against the tribes? But most baffling of all. Why did the monsters bother with attacking the Chinese when they could just as easily move to any other part of the world that lack this defensive construction?

The movie would have made a lot more sense if the Chinese had not known about these monsters. Then the lack of proper countermeasures would have made a lot more sense. The wall was made to keep out the steppe people, not massive deadly beasts. Yes, I know.. The movie has to be spectacular. But couldn't they not have put some effort into it to make it also more logical? Now it feels like the Chinese are just stupid and require a foreigner to save the day. Oh yeah, an American foreigner.