Damon, rather than falling into a kind of White Savior role is instead awed and rehabilitated by his experience with the Chinese. Except, you know, that already happened.Īnyway, as for the movie itself, it isn’t nearly as bad as you’d expect it to be.
Not until a Chinese film filled with bona fide Chinese stars breaks through and makes a ton of money in North America will Hollywood take notice. Either way, the system isn’t going to change. Conversely, if the movie fails, the blame will be placed on the director or the production values (the “crappy Chinese CGI” bugaboo of America’s laziest film critics), rather than the Big Star or the veteran Hollywood screenwriters (whose dialogue, nevertheless, might best be described as “uninspired Paul WS Anderson”). They will have confirmed their belief that only through the perspective of a Handsome White Man can a movie be expected to draw in a broad audience. The double-bind here is that if the movie turns out to be a hit, the lesson Hollywood will learn is that only Hollywood actors are bankable, making them less likely to expand the Chinese presence in the North American market.
So why not try making a Chinese movie with a bona fide Hollywood star, rather than the washed-up likes of Adrien Brody and John Cusack Jackie Chan used in 2014’s Dragon Blade? Almost no Chinese films are allowed to compete in the wider American market, being ghettoized to a handful of screens in major cities without promotion for the general audience.
#The great wall movie dragons how to
This is both a fair criticism and somewhat beside the point: no one has yet figured out exactly how to crossover from China to the North American market: Jackie Chan and Jet Li’s 2008 collaboration The Forbidden Kingdom was both a moderate hit and instantly forgotten, while last year Yuen Woo-ping’s Netflix movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny was better, but though its popularity is hard to measure because it was a Netflix-only release, it doesn’t seem to have caught on with audiences. Much has been made in the American press of the casting of Damon as the hero in a Chinese movie, and how this relates to the persistent white-washing of Asian roles in Hollywood cinema.
#The great wall movie dragons series
The well-organized and color-coordinated Chinese soldiers manning The Wall are initially suspicious of Damon and his friend, played by Pedro Pascal, but eventually they join the fight in a series of entertaining spectacles leavened by a few moments of such beauty that you remember that this is a Zhang Yimou film after all. Matt Damon is our audience surrogate, a white man on the road to China to trade for (that is, steal) gunpowder, heretofore undiscovered in Christendom. He encounters The Wall and learns that it is designed not to defend against the horse archers of the Mongolian steppes, but rather vicious alien lizards that hatch every 60 years and attempt to eat everything in sight: half giant iguana, half locust, half cicada. The Great Wall, an experiment in co-production between Hollywood and China, opens with the spinning globe of the Universal Studios logo, its computer-generated image rotating slowly as it zooms in on the eponymous defensive fortification, helpfully orienting the hoped-for American audience by showing them where exactly the nation of China is located.
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