Zhang Yimou’s first English-language film opens with a promise it cannot keep. A tagline asks what 1,700 years and 5,500 miles of stone were built to hold back. The Great Wall answers with monsters, magnets and Matt Damon, and the answer is thinner than the question.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures UK.
A Mercenary, a Spaniard and a Wall
The Great Wall is a 2016 monster film directed by Zhang Yimou, written by Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy from a story by Max Brooks, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. It runs 103 minutes. It is an American and Chinese co-production, and it stars Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe and Andy Lau.
The plot is simple enough to fit on a shield. Two European mercenaries come to China hunting gunpowder. A monster kills the rest of their party a few miles north of the Wall. Irishman William Garin (Damon) and Spaniard Pero Tovar (Pascal) survive, cut off the creature’s arm and carry it with them.
Imperial forces take them prisoner. The Nameless Order, led by General Shao (Zhang Hanyu) and Strategist Wang (Andy Lau), exists to fight the Tao Tei — alien monsters that arrived on a meteorite and attack once every sixty years.
The Tao Tei Come One Week Early
The Order’s commanders are surprised by the first assault. It has come one week early. Then a horde of Tao Tei hits the Wall, and the film’s central set piece begins.
Ballard (Dafoe), an Englishman who came east twenty-five years earlier and stayed, frees Garin and Tovar during the fight. The two display battle skills that save young warrior Peng Yong (Lu Han) and kill two monsters. The Order starts to respect them. Both sides take heavy losses before the monsters’ queen calls off the attack.
That is the shape of the whole movie: a siege, a pause, another siege. The three Europeans quietly plan to steal gunpowder and run during the next attack. Then two Tao Tei climb the Wall at night. General Shao dies, and he places Commander Lin Mae (Jing Tian) in charge of the Nameless Order.
Magnets, a Scroll and a Captured Monster
An envoy from the capital arrives with an ancient scroll. It suggests the monsters are pacified by magnets. Wang thinks the magnetic stone Garin carries is why he killed the Tao Tei he met. To test the idea, he proposes capturing a Tao Tei alive, and agrees to help.
This delays the escape. Tovar is angry but agrees to assist Garin. In the next fight, the Westerners capture a monster and prove the theory. Then the Imperial envoy claims the creature and takes it.
The cast is deep on paper and shallow on screen. Zhang Hanyu, Lu Han, Lin Gengxin, Eddie Peng Yu-Yan, Huang Xuan, Ryan Zheng Kai and Karry Wang fill out the Order’s commanders and the emperor’s court. Almost none of them get a scene that belongs to them.
What the Money Bought
The film premiered in Beijing on December 6, 2016. China Film Group released it in China on December 16, 2016. Universal Pictures released it in the United States on February 17, 2017, and Toho-Towa released it in Japan on April 14, 2017.
Principal photography began on March 30, 2015, in Qingdao. The Great Wall grossed $334.9 million worldwide and was considered a box-office bomb for losing up to $75 million. It received mixed reviews from critics.
Those are the numbers, and they tell a cleaner story than the screenplay does. A film with this budget, this director and this cast should not have needed a tagline to explain its own premise. The three things the production actually sold were:
- Zhang Yimou’s first English-language film
- Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal as mercenaries
- A horde of alien monsters besieging the Great Wall of China
Each one is true. None of them is enough.
The Order of What Actually Works
Ranked by what The Great Wall gets right, the list is short and the order is not close.
- The Wall itself. Zhang shoots the structure as a machine, not a monument — towers, cables, formations, soldiers moving in patterns. It is the only element in the film that feels designed rather than assembled.
- Jing Tian as Commander Lin Mae. She inherits command when General Shao dies, and she is the only character whose rank costs her something. The film notices this for about ten minutes.
- The Tao Tei design. A meteorite origin, a sixty-year cycle, a queen who calls off attacks — the monsters have rules. Rules are what make a siege tense.
- The magnet theory. Wang’s hypothesis is the one idea in the script that requires the characters to think. It arrives late and pays off fast.
- Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal. Both are competent. Neither is given a reason to be here beyond the gunpowder they came for.
Everything below that line is noise: the Imperial envoy who claims the captured monster, the escape plan that keeps getting delayed, the twenty-five years Ballard spent in the east and never explains.
A Siege With No One Inside It
The Great Wall has a siege, a theory, a traitor’s errand and a queen. It does not have a single character who wants anything the audience can feel. Garin wants gunpowder. Tovar wants gunpowder. Ballard wants nothing in particular. Lin Mae wants to hold the Wall, which is her job, not her want.
The film’s best idea is that the Tao Tei are a clock. Every sixty years they come, and the Nameless Order exists to meet them. That is a premise with dread built into it. The Great Wall spends it on two battles and a test.
Damon is fine. Pascal is fine. Dafoe is given the most interesting backstory in the script — twenty-five years east, a man who came for something and stayed — and the film uses him as a lockpick. Andy Lau, one of the great screen presences of his generation, spends the movie explaining magnets.
The dialogue is functional. The action is legible. The monsters are consistent. None of that is the problem. The problem is that a 103-minute film about a 5,500-mile wall and a 1,700-year wait never once makes you feel the weight of either number.
Where the $75 Million Went
The Great Wall cost enough to lose up to $75 million and earned $334.9 million worldwide. That gap is the most interesting fact about it. The film was built as a bridge between two film industries, with a Chinese director, an American star and a monster that could play in both markets.
The bridge did not hold. Not because the idea was bad — a Zhang Yimou siege picture with an international cast is a genuinely good idea — but because the script treats the Wall as a backdrop and the Order as extras. The Nameless Order has commanders, ranks, colors and a chain of command. It has no people.
Compare it to what Zhang does when he is allowed to be Zhang. The Wall here is a set. In his best work the set is the argument. The Great Wall has the scale and none of the conviction, which is why the tagline lands as a question the movie never answers.
The Verdict on The Great Wall
This is a film that should have been stranger. A meteorite, a sixty-year cycle, a queen who calls off her own attack, a theory about magnets — the pieces are all there, and every one of them is treated as a plot point to be cleared rather than a mystery to be sat with.
What matters here is not that The Great Wall is bad. Plenty of expensive films are bad. What matters is that it is incurious. It has a genuinely original monster mythology and a genuinely original setting, and it uses them to stage two fights and a capture.
The detail worth watching is Lin Mae. Jing Tian takes command of the Nameless Order when General Shao dies, and for a few scenes the film has a protagonist with a rank, a duty and a cost. Then it hands the movie back to the mercenaries and the gunpowder.
The Great Wall wanted to be a monster movie about a wall. It ended up a monster movie about two men who wanted to leave. That is a smaller film, and the $75 million loss is the receipt.
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