What they find is the Great Wall of China.
It is their key to a life of luxury in the west. He and his Spanish partner, Toval (Pedro Pascal), have been searching for the legendary black powder that explodes.
Matt Damon stars as William, a mercenary and crack archer in Crusade era China. Zhang has made a highly cinematic popcorn flick.
It's action packed, beautifully shot, and much more humorous than expected. The Great Wall is entertaining and swift. Why is Matt Damon, a Caucasian American actor, the lead in a Chinese film? Don't let the negative, pre-release publicity influence you. Then there was the whole " whitewashing" controversy. My interest was not piqued, even though I have been an ardent fan of Zhang's work. I must admit to being underwhelmed by the trailers. But until then, I’ll gladly take this.Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall is a sleek monster film that befits the artistry of its director. I will be delighted when we reach a moment in which a movie like The Great Wall is considered worthy of a wide release and of mainstream interest without a white man at its center. The script may have been written by a bunch of white guys (Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, Tony Gilroy, Max Brooks, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz), but it does not pretend that in the 10th or 11th century, when this is taking place, that the white guy was not the savage, or that China did not represent the pinnacle of civilization, one with far superior technology (though I’m not sure magnets would have tripped up the Chinese the way that happens here). Damon’s William - a foreign mercenary who has journeyed to China to secure some of the rumored “black powder” - is welcomed even though he is a barbarian, and though the Nameless Order, led by General Shao (Zhang Hanyu), are wary of him at first, what follows between the visitor and the locals is not a culture clash so much as an exchange of ideas… and mostly in William’s direction. (There is a suggestion, in fact, that they might have alien origins.) The symbolism of the Tao Tei is about as deep as The Great Wall gets, unless you want to count the unspoken - and likely unintended - implication that walls are required only to keep out monsters (and even then walls are not unbreachable), not foreigners. These things like to eat, and they do not appear to be of this Earth. The soldiers of the Nameless Order - love it! - are defending the realm against hordes of monsters they call the Tao Tei, which are based on a fictitious creature from Chinese mythology that represent greed and gluttony. The daring of the women warriors of the Crane Corps, led by Commander Lin (Jing Tian): oh my! There’s a visual loopiness here that’s more Hollywoodized than we’ve seen before from director Zhang Yimou - I adore his glorious House of Flying Daggers not so much his Curse of the Golden Flower, though it is visually wild - but is still tense and exciting in a way that feels fresh and engaging.
I had the sort of plain pure fun watching this movie that usually comes with a Star Wars flick. The characters are a bit thin, and in a few places the CGI is a little cheesy, but at its best, The Great Wall is Lord of the Rings meets Aliens presented with incredible imaginative grandeur, genuinely breathtaking 3D depth, and stuff flying off the screen at you that had me flinching and blinking in ways that I can’t recall ever happening before. But then it’s unlikely that this movie would have been released in IMAX 3D, and that is the way to see take in the spectacular fantasy warfare that is the real reason to see this. Now, I think I would have loved The Great Wall just as much if it starred the great Andy Lau ( House of Flying Daggers, Infernal Affairs) as the central character instead of shuffling him off to a supporting role (where he is still great), and if the whole thing was subtitled instead of just a few bits here and there. On the scale of how badly it could have gone - casting a white Hollywood actor in a Chinese production in order to lure in xenophobic Western movie audiences - what we have here in The Great Wall is fairly inoffensive (she said as a white Westerner).