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Chinese/American co-produced action-fantasy "The Great Wall" doesn't feel like a McDonald's-ified version of a Chinese film. True, when square-jawed Matt Damon fights alien monsters side-by-side with Chinese soldiers, the film sometimes feels like a spectacular big-budget action epic with a golden-age western-style hero. But the makers of "The Great Wall" succeed where many westerns fear to tread, namely by un-ironically valorizing the selfless collectivism that has become a cultural touchstone of modern Chinese cinema. "The Great Wall" has significant problems—namely with Damon and sidekick Pedro Pascal's lack of bromantic chemistry—but chief among its rewards is its ability to marry its Eastern and Western sensibilities.

Damon and Pascal play William and Tovar, respectively, wandering European mercenaries who are captured by the Chinese army of the Nameless Order shortly after they slay a mysterious green monster. The monster, they are told, is a "Tei Tao," one of a horde of creatures that attacks the now-famous Great Wall of China once every 60 years. William and Tovar are initially unmoved by the Nameless Order's considerable plight; they want to make their fortunes by stealing gunpowder from their hosts, and selling it to European traders. But eventually, William and Tovar's agendas drift apart after William becomes seduced by the formal control and selfless zeal that defines the Nameless Order.

And who wouldn't be impressed? The Nameless Order marches around in colorful suits of armor that come in hues of indigo, crimson and cerulean. They launch themselves at their enemies using pulleys, bungee cords, hot-air balloons, boulder-spewing catapults, and many, many arrows. Each crowd shot in this film is remarkable, but not because director Zhang Yimou ("Hero," " House of Flying Daggers ") and his assistant directors know how to direct extras. On the contrary, the impassive faces of the Nameless Order's soldiers remind us that all of these people, together, are remarkable. In that sense, the scene where William admits that he killed a Tei Tao "alone," without the aid of Tovar or his slain mercenary colleagues, is a significant reminder of the film's communal ideology: William, as an undisciplined loner, must prove that he's worth just as much as a selfless Chinese soldier.

The film's action scenes also exemplify a sense of precise, shared responsibility that one rarely sees in action-spectaculars. The army works together as a unit, just as the Tei Tao do. You can imagine how hard that philosophy might be to enforce given that it demands a big enough budget to focus on two warring armies' clashing maneuvers. But no, the film's action set pieces are not only thrillingly large-scale, but visually rapturous, despite a preponderance of computer-generated imagery. There are a handful of well-choreographed and well-directed, Damon-centric action sequences, but it's very easy to be seduced by scenes that focus on impersonal warfare. In the latter scenes, the art department flexes their collective muscles with every lionhead-shaped helmet and barbed offensive weapon. Who could remain unmoved after watching a group of individuals dangle, thrust, and throw everything they've got at a legion of deranged-looking creatures?

Unfortunately, the film slows down whenever it becomes a buddy comedy starring William and Tovar. If I had to guess, I'd say that screenwriter Tony Gilroy (" Duplicity ," " The Bourne Legacy ") was brought on to the film to punch up Damon and Pascal's wobbly scenes of light banter. But there's no spark between the two actors. In these scenes, Damon and Pascal perform time-honored roles that you'll find in many Asian films: the Caucasian performers who look like they wandered onto the wrong set and are unsure of what acting is. Damon orates through clenched teeth, which suits his fight scenes, but makes him sound constipated. Combine that with a weird Irish-inflected accent that presumably is meant to be generically European—his character boasts about fighting in various European conflicts—and you've got a crucial black hole where your leading man should be.

Thankfully, "The Great Wall" isn't really about Damon's character. In fact, it works best when he's part of a group, though he does predictably drift into a leadership role eventually. William's story is an assimilation narrative, after all, one where the hero sees the error of his past and tries to fit into a society that values utilitarian goals over individual needs. "The Great Wall" is unlike any American blockbuster you've seen, a conservative movie with action set pieces that are actually inventive and thrilling enough to be worthwhile. See it on as big a screen as you can.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in The New York Times , Vanity Fair , The Village Voice, and elsewhere.

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The Great Wall (2017)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of fantasy action violence.

103 minutes

Matt Damon as William Garin

Willem Dafoe as Ballard

Pedro Pascal as Pero Tovar

Andy Lau as Wang Junshi

Tian Jing as General Lin Mei

Hanyu Zhang as General Shao

Eddie Peng as General Wu

Lin Gengxin as General Chen

Ryan Zheng Kai as General Deng

Xuan Huang as Commander Deng

Lu Han as Peng Yong

Cheney Chen as Imperial Officer

Numan Acar as Najid

Zhang Yimou

Writer (story)

Marshall Herskovitz
Edward Zwick
Carlo Bernard
Tony Gilroy

Cinematographer

Stuart Dryburgh
Xiaoding Zhao
Mary Jo Markey
Ramin Djawadi

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User reviews

The Great Wall

In ancient China, a group of European mercenaries encounters a secret army that maintains and defends the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures. In ancient China, a group of European mercenaries encounters a secret army that maintains and defends the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures. In ancient China, a group of European mercenaries encounters a secret army that maintains and defends the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures.

Yimou Zhang
Carlo Bernard
Tony Gilroy
Willem Dafoe
557 User reviews
276 Critic reviews
42 Metascore
3 wins & 2 nominations

Commander Lin Mae

Strategist Wang

General Shao

Commander Chen

Commander Wu

Commander Deng

(as Zheng Kai)

(as Junkai Wang)

Imperial Officer

Lieutenant Xiao Yu
(as Xintian Yu)

Lin Mae's 2nd Lieutenant Li Qing
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia This was the most expensive Chinese film ever, with a budget of $135 million and, due to the huge amount of crew involved, had over 100 translators.
Goofs Only one magnetic stone, which can pacify the Tao Tei, appeared in the movie. The stone was brought in by William the European mercenary. In reality, Chinese civilization first made compasses from magnetic stones in Han dynasty (< AD100). By the time point of the movie (somewhen between AD960 and AD1127), the compass had been widely used in navigation. It shouldn't be hard to find more magnetic stones inside China. Magnetic stones (lodestones) are not normally very strong. William's was far more powerful than normal, as evidenced by its "reach out" distance of several feet. The normal magnetic stones found in China were not strong enough to affect the Tao Tei.

William : I fought for Harold against the Danes. I saved a Duke's life. I fought for him until he died. Fought for Spain against the Franks. Fought for the Franks against the Boulogne. I fought for the Pope. Many flags.

Crazy credits The Universal logo appears quicker than usual, and after appearing the Earth zooms into China, going all the way to a section of the Great Wall and through a crack in the section. During the zoom the Legendary Pictures logo appears (in reverse).
Alternate versions This film will be released in the Mandarin language separately in English-speaking countries --- that is, at least Australia. Both English and Mandarin versions have been classified.
Connections Featured in Hollywood Express: Episode #14.32 (2016)
Soundtracks At the Border Vocal by Zhao Mu-Yang Lyrics by Wang Changling Melody by Leehom Wang

User reviews 557

Mar 24, 2017
How long is The Great Wall? Powered by Alexa
February 17, 2017 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Official site
Tử Chiến Tường Thành
New Zealand
Legendary East
Atlas Entertainment
China Film Co., Ltd.
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$150,000,000 (estimated)
$45,540,830
$18,469,620
Feb 19, 2017
$334,933,831

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 43 minutes
IMAX 6-Track
Dolby Surround 7.1

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The great wall, common sense media reviewers.

Action fantasy based on Chinese myths falls short.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Fighting for causes that you don't believe in

Commander Lin (a strong female character) is coura

Tons of peril and battles involving sword fighting

A little romantic tension between the male and fem

Very infrequent, but includes "s--t," &q

Reference to being drunk in the past.

Positive Messages

Fighting for causes that you don't believe in -- and only for money -- can wear on your soul, while fighting with a purpose can be noble. (Still, it's all about fighting.) Characters work together to defeat the monsters.

Positive Role Models

Commander Lin (a strong female character) is courageous, principled, and also open to learning from the soldiers she commands. William is brave and tenacious, as well as very loyal. The white characters are portrayed as more barbaric, while the Chinese are presented as refined and honorable.

Violence & Scariness

Tons of peril and battles involving sword fighting, knives, and arrows; in some cases arrows are shown piercing bodies. Both monster and human blood is spilled (particularly the former), but since many of the battles are against monsters, they have a cartoonish quality. A character holds a knife against another's neck. Entire groups are killed by big explosions. The monsters, which are sort of a dinosaur/alien hybrid, can be scary; they eat some people.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A little romantic tension between the male and female leads. Some male soldiers have uniforms that show their torso.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Very infrequent, but includes "s--t," "hell," "bastard," and "bitch," as well as "my god" and "mother of god."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Great Wall is a fantasy action film set in medieval China starring Matt Damon . Violence is the main issue here; there's tons of peril and many battles, including sword fights, arrows piercing bodies, explosions, and more. Plus, many of the fights involve scary monsters (which have green blood), which wreak havoc and sometimes eat people. There's also a very little bit of swearing ("hell," "bastard," "bitch") and a bit of romantic tension between main characters. Speaking of the main characters, one is a strong, brave, principled female leader. While the film sparked controversy for casting a white actor in a story about China, the good news is that, for the most part, the movie avoids stereotyping; if anything, the white characters are portrayed as barbaric, while the Chinese are depicted as refined and honorable. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

Parents say (7)
Kids say (9)

Based on 7 parent reviews

Missed Opportunity!

Awesome movie for tween to teens and older., what's the story.

William ( Matt Damon ) and Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are 15th-century mercenaries who find themselves stymied during their travels by a massive wall -- in fact, it's THE GREAT WALL. Chinese military leaders, especially gifted Commander Lin (Tian Jing), are suspicious of the pair's motives, but when they're all threatened by otherworldly creatures known as the tao tei , William joins in his captors' monumental battle against the monsters. Nothing less than the fate of the world is at stake.

Is It Any Good?

A hybrid between a historical epic and an action fantasy, the film manages to be only a passable example of each genre, which makes it less memorable than it had the potential to be. Damon serves up a dignified performance, if you ignore his dubious accent (a mushed-up concoction meant to recall an Irishman by way of America, perhaps?). Whether his bromance with partner-in-crime Pascal needed to be in the mix is yet another iffy decision, confusing the genre dilemma even further.

That said, The Great Wall has its merits, starting with the cinematography. Setting aside the over-CGI-ed monsters, the titular wall is a sight to behold. A scene in which soldiers throw hundreds of lanterns aloft is simply breathtaking. And then there's the fearless female commander, Lin. She may not have much depth, character-wise, but seeing her take command -- and sharing the story's spotlight with William -- is a breath of fresh air.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in The Great Wall. Does the fact that much of it involves monsters/fantasy elements change its impact ?

What character strengths do the people in the movie exhibit? Does that make them role models ?

The movie drew some controversy for having a white American actor at the heart of a story steeped in Chinese history. Why would that be controversial?

Had you ever heard anything about this part of Chinese mythology and history before? How could you find out more if you wanted to?

Movie Details

In theaters : February 17, 2017
On DVD or streaming : May 23, 2017
Cast : Matt Damon , Willem Dafoe , Pedro Pascal
Director : Zhang Yimou
Inclusion Information : Latino actors
Studio : Universal Pictures
Genre : Action/Adventure
Topics : Magic and Fantasy , History
Run time : 103 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sequences of fantasy action violence
Last updated : February 26, 2023

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‘the great wall’ (‘chang cheng’): film review.

Matt Damon teams up with Chinese A-listers to battle monsters in 'The Great Wall,' Zhang Yimou's first English-language feature.

By Clarence Tsui

Clarence Tsui

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The Great Wall has long been talked up as a landmark of sorts: It’s Matt Damon ‘s first foray into China, Zhang Yimou’s first predominantly English-language production and the first film to come out of Legendary Pictures ‘ continent-hopping strategy. The result, however, has turned out to be much less exciting than all the hype might have suggested.

Beyond the casting and the ceaseless onslaught of diverse special effects, Zhang and his Hollywood screenwriters have delivered nothing more than a formulaic monster movie — albeit one transposed to a historically undefined China where generals dressed like Terracotta warriors already have mastered anesthetics, air travel and American-accented English.

Release date: Feb 17, 2017

Telling the fantastical story of a massive battle waged to stop paranormal beasts from invading China, The Great Wall is easily the least interesting and involving blockbuster of the respective careers of both its director and star. Still, Damon has certainly lent the whole enterprise a certain pedigree, and his presence (alongside Willem Dafoe and Chinese A-listers Andy Lau and Zhang Hanyu ) should propel the film to box-office success in China. For the international market, however, the film perhaps would best be positioned as a novelty for monster-flick fanboys or those interested in Zhang’s brand of cultural exotica.

Using computer-generated images of the Great Wall, the film begins with short onscreen texts explaining that, as the wall enters its third millennium in existence, there are both facts and legends about it. “This is one of the legends,” the text reads, offering a disclaimer geared toward detractors readying to question the extraordinary premise to follow.

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‘The Great Wall’ Review: China Will Lead the Way in Defeating the Meteor Monsters

While Zhang Yimou’s film thankfully avoids the white savior trope, 'The Great Wall' is still a dull and lifeless blockbuster.

The advertising for The Great Wall made it looks like another white savior story. Matt Damon would play the Chosen One of Anglo-Saxon descent who would come to savage China and save the hapless Chinese people from the monsters. After seeing Zhang Yimou ’s period action film, I’m happy to report that’s not the case. If anything, it’s China who comes out ahead in terms of glory and honor. And yet, despite the interesting subtext regarding our current geopolitical power dynamic, The Great Wall largely lacks the flair and intimacy of Yimou’s previous action films, and instead plays as a fairly rote blockbuster designed to appeal to everyone and thus appealing to no one.

William (Damon) and Tovar ( Pedro Pascal ) are soldiers from Europe who have come to China seeking the fabled “black powder”, an ingredient in a super weapon that could make them rich. However, they are captured by Chinese soldiers working for “The Nameless Order” and taken to the Great Wall. There, they discover that China is under attack by meteor monsters called the Tao Tei. After proving themselves in battle, William and Tovar gain the trust of Commander Lin ( Jing Tian ), but while Tovar still seeks to gain the black powder, William is intrigued by Lin’s exaltations of honor and sacrifice over personal gain.

Yes, William is special in that he’s really good with a bow, but the film goes out of its way to make sure you know that Lin is the true hero of the story and that William becomes a better man by following her example. William and Tovar are motivated by greed and self-interest while Lin shows that fighting for others is what’s truly important in life. Additionally, she’s a worthy fighter in her own right, and ultimately William’s purpose in the story isn’t to save the day, but to learn from Lin.

While some may decry this as Chinese propaganda, it’s no more brazen than the American President leading the world in a rallying cry against aliens in Independence Day . China footed the bill for The Great Wall , and although American audiences may not be used to another country getting to lead the way, they may want to get on board. China isn’t going anywhere, they play a huge role in international box office, and studios are realizing that Chinese audiences want to see Chinese people play the heroes. Matt Damon may be the lead on the posters, but China is the true star of The Great Wall .

So it’s a shame that the overall film is so bland and forgettable. For all of the lavish production and costume design, the movie pales in comparison to Yimou’s past period actioners like Hero and House of Flying Daggers . Rather than the smooth, confident cinematography that lets the action shine, Yimou seems at a loss with what to do when crowding his movie with CGI monsters and actors like Damon and Pescal, who are charming and charismatic, but lack the martial arts skills of someone like Jet Li or Andy Lau .

That being said, Damon makes a bizarre choice with a weird accent that seems completely removed from place and time. On the one hand, I appreciate he didn’t go straight British for a period accent, but at the same time, you’re always aware that Damon is straining for some odd mixture of Scottish and Irish, and it’s incredibly distracting. It also doesn’t help that he has far more chemistry with Pascal than with Tian, and while The Great Wall didn’t really work for me, I wouldn’t object to seeing Damon and Pascal co-star in more movies together.

The Great Wall provides an interesting snapshot at our current geopolitical landscape where China’s power is increasing, and we can see that reflected in our entertainment. That being said, that’s background to a fairly uninteresting action movie where you don’t really care that much about the characters, the threat lacks personality, and the expense of the production far exceeds the quality of the script. At best, The Great Wall provides an interesting look at what could be the future of international cinema, but it doesn’t make much of a stand on its own.

Screen Rant

The great wall review, despite some inspired elements, the great wall is an odd mashup of hollywood monster blockbuster and sweeping chinese fantasy epic..

William Garin (Matt Damon) and Pero Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are a pair of European mercenaries leading some twenty men on a mission in ancient China: to track down and get their hands on the dangerous weapon known as black powder. However, their expedition proves to be far from successful, leaving William and Pero as the only survivors of their original group, after an encounter with a strange creature one night. The duo's prospects fail to improve the next day when they stumble upon the Great Wall of China and are taken prisoner by a secret division of the Imperial army that resides there... only for legions of monsters like the one that they crossed paths with before to appear, launching a full-scale assault against the Wall.

After proving themselves useful in battle, William and Pero are set free and informed by the secret division's leaders - including one Crane Troop Commander Lin Mae (Jing Tian) - that the creatures are mystical beasts known as Taotie and attack the northern region of China (protected by the Wall), every sixty years. When the duo's fellow non-Chinese mercenary Sir Ballard (Willem Dafoe), who has resided at the Wall for decades, approaches Perl and William with an offer to steal the black powder kept there, the latter is faced with the choice: should he accept Ballard's deal or stay at the Wall and fight for something much bigger than himself?

Zhang Yimou is well-renowned for his work on intimate period dramas ( Raise the Red Lantern , To Live ) and historical martial arts operas ( Hero , House of Flying Daggers ), but the Chinese filmmaker suffers a rough landing with his leap into the world of big-budget Hollywood tentpoles on The Great Wall . An East-meets-West adventure both thematically and aesthetically, The Great Wall struggles to seamlessly blend the tropes of Legendary's monster movie offerings ( Pacific Rim , Godzilla ) with the lavishing atmosphere and style of a larger-scale Chinese production, such as Yimou's 2006 film, Curse of the Golden Flower . Despite some inspired elements, The Great Wall is an odd mashup of Hollywood monster blockbuster and sweeping Chinese fantasy epic.

The mythology and world-building in The Great Wall script credited to writing duo Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro ( Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ), as well as Tony Gilroy ( Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ), and based on a screen story conceived by World War Z author Max Brooks, is itself a mixed bag. While the intricacies of how China's secret army division operates is fascinating and the fantasy allegory presented by the Taotie in The Great Wall has potential, the latter creatures are little more than a tired variation on the typical mindless army of CGI monsters functioning with a hive mentality - minus the complexities of similar and more interesting creatures from recent blockbuster fare, such as the Mimics in Edge of Tomorrow . In terms of the humans vs. Taotie battles, they too are a mixed bag that feature some dynamic camerawork and clever uses of 3D visual techniques, but grow increasingly bloated and bogged down in CGI overload, as The Great Wall adds more and more ingredients (read: ancient world battle technology) to the mix.

Yimou's Chinese films, as was mentioned before, are known for their beautiful costumes, as well as their exquisitely-crafted practical sets, and The Great Wall doesn't disappoint in this respect. In spite of this, however, The Great Wall is far less visually pleasing then Yimou's previous movies, as its CGI components (digital tracking shots, green screen backdrops) often stick out awkwardly when juxtaposed with the film's human cast and hand-crafted sets. The Great Wall features two directors of photography in the forms of Yimou's frequent collaborator, Xiaoding Zhao, and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh ( Alice Through the Looking Glass ) - something that may explain why the film often comes across as an ungainly hybrid of a Chinese historical epic and Hollywood blockbuster adventure, in terms of its visual design.

While the marketing for The Great Wall has raised concerns that Matt Damon is playing a White Savior archetype, in action Damon's character is more like a glorified sidekick (shoehorned into the spotlight, admittedly) to the film's true day-saving hero; Jing Tian's Commander Lin Mae. Tian does fine playing the budding hero here - boding well for her future appearances in other Legendary films - whereas Damon is unusually-stilted in his performance and has better chemistry with costar Pedro Pascal than Tian. However, as a story about how a warrior from the West (Damon) and a solider from the East (Tian) change and affect one another through their differences, The Great Wall falls short. The way in which the film champions the traditionalist Chinese values of characters such as Lin over those of William is in keeping with the thematic motifs of Yimou's previous movies (see Hero , in particular), but it does so at the expense of giving its protagonists more compelling personal arcs.

Pascal, as was indicated earlier, brings needed charisma opposite Damon in The Great Wall , while Willem Dafoe plays a fellow who is somewhat comically untrustworthy and cartoonishly self-motivated. This is in keeping with the film's general outlook towards Westerners, as is the characterization of the Chinese soldiers played by Andy Lau and Zhang Hanyu - both of them noble, duty-bound warriors who serve the greater good, yet are as two-dimensional as their non-Chinese counterparts. The Great Wall brings to mind co-writers Bernard and Miro's script work on Prince of Persia in this respect, as that film also tried to infuse modern political commentary into a fantasy adventure epic intended for a global audience. While The Great Wall is more narratively cohesive than Prince of Persia , its political subtext doesn't leave much of an impression (good or bad) - as the movie's universe and the people who exist within it, are by and large half-baked in terms of their development.

The Great Wall can be best summed up as an interesting-in-theory, but only partly successful-in-action experiment in blending Hollywood popcorn movie tropes with Chinese historical epic filmmaking sensibilities. Thanks to a surprisingly short runtime (compared to most blockbusters nowadays) and elements that lend it unintended camp value (see again, Damon's stilted performance and accent), The Great Wall may offer decent entertainment for those moviegoers who are in the mood for some silly CGI monster mayhem. For others, however, The Great Wall will probably be little more than a small step up (at most) from such past Legendary tentpole misfires as Seventh Son .

The Great Wall is now playing in U.S. theaters. It is 103 minutes long and is Rated PG-13 for sequences of fantasy action violence.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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DVD & Streaming

The Great Wall

Content caution.

In Theaters

February 17, 2017
Matt Damon as William; Tian Jing as Commander Lin Mae; Pedro Pascal as Tovar; Willem Dafoe as Ballard; Andy Lau as Strategist Wang

Home Release Date

May 23, 2017
Yimou Zhang

Distributor

Universal Pictures

Movie Review

When he started his trek with a band of some thirty other fighters, William was little more than a 15th-century mercenary. He was a very good one, mind you, a master archer. But he’d spent his whole life fighting for the flag of whoever would pay him to nock an arrow or two … and knock down combatants on the receiving end.

This time, however, things would be different.

William’s latest venture was supposed to be his chance to become a wealthy man. He and his men-of-war had determined they would journey to exotic China and procure a legendary substance: a black powder of the East that reportedly turned the air itself into an explosion of flame. If it was real, that sort of seemingly magical matter could change any man’s fortune on the battlefield.

By the time William actually finds the stuff, however, his group has been whittled down, death by death, to just him and a Spanish warrior named Tovar. And where they find the black powder, well, that is almost beyond belief.

William and Tovar stumble upon a wall in this strange and dangerous land. And not just any wall. No, this gigantic edifice stretches across the horizon as far as the eye can see in either direction. And manning this massive rampart is a monumental army, the size of which William has never witnessed in all his years of war.

Why are they there? What are they protecting? Surely those myriad Chinese soldiers aren’t amassed just to keep foreigners such as William and Tovar away from that rumored explosive powder.

The journeymen soon get answers to their questions: The warriors on the wall are there to protect their people from the hordes of something called the Tao Tei . Every 60 years, these dragon-like beasts swarm down from the mountains by the hundreds of thousands. And the only thing that keeps them from destroying all of China—and then perhaps the rest of humanity—is this wall and its grimly determined army.

Unbelievable as that story sounded to William’s ears, it’s quickly proven true. The first wave of the deadly beasts’ assault is vicious and fearsome. And for all of their bravery and might, the Chinese army barely holds the wall during that initial attack.

As the Chinese warriors, men and women, bind their wounds and prepare for the next onslaught, William realizes something: This time, things are different. This time, William’s fighting for something more than just money.

For unlike any other battle in his life, this time William has a cause well worth fighting for.

Positive Elements

As William is drawn to the plight of the besieged Chinese army, Tavor warns him not to play the hero. “I know who you are, know what you are: You’re a thief, a liar and a killer,” he spits. William has been all of those things, of course. But now, there’s an opportunity for redemption.

A female warrior named Commander Lin talks to William about the honor of trusting those who fight beside you and battling for the good of all. That sentiment plucks a chord for the seasoned fighter. William is compelled to put his life on the line for what’s right, for a people who were only shortly before unknown foreigners whom he’d intended to plunder. He repeatedly saves those around him, and ultimately relinquishes his plan to purloin Chinese black powder. In fact, at one point he even turns aside an easy offer of wealth to simply aid a friend in trouble.

Throughout the film, we also see others who are willing to make great sacrifices—even their very lives—to save their compatriots.

Spiritual Elements

Though they’re never presented in an explicitly spiritual way, the mystical Toa Tei have telepathic powers as well as Chinese characters mysteriously inscribed on their foreheads. Tovar asks, “What god made these things?” when he first glimpses the attacking monsters. “None that we know,” William replies.

Sexual Content

Female warriors’ armor accents their feminine curves. William is shown shirtless as his wounds are treated.

Violent Content

There’s quite a bit of explosive thumping and gushing in this action-heavy movie. Fiery, cannonball-like projectiles explode, fields and buildings burn, arrows fill the air and great beasts leap out of the night with screeching fury.

The monstrous Tao Tei get sliced in half with large blades, as well as being dismembered and decapitated. Human warriors jam spears and arrows into the monsters’ eyes. Other beasties get blown into large chunks by explosives—all to gory, graphic, goopily green effect.

Humans die by the score, too, as the ferocious Tao Tei pounce on them in savage packs. The dragon-like creatures feed on human victims with sharp-toothed maws. In these cases, however, the goriness is dialed back just a bit. Throughout most of the movie, human heroes get battered, scraped and lightly bloodied, but their explosive obliteration and the rending of their flesh is generally just offscreen.

Crude or Profane Language

Two s-words and a handful of uses each of “b–tard” and “h—.” People exclaim, “Good god!” and “Mother of god!”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Other negative elements.

Two men steal vital resources in an effort to gain riches, putting hundreds of others at risk.

The Great Wall is all about big.

This is one of the first co-produced efforts blending Chinese cinematic sweep and Hollywood CGI-fueled star power. It tells the epically colossal story of a 13,000 mile wall supporting an enormous army that’s fending off vast throngs of gigantic, hive-minded beasties. And the movie even sports a big American star: Matt Damon grunts out his beefy lines and shoots scores of pinpoint-targeted arrows while taking his heroic stand amid a swirling multitude of colorfully clad Chinese soldiers.

Chinese director Yimou Zhang ignites the scenery with mammoth fiery cannonballs, filling the air with everything from screaming arrows to bungie-jumping soldiers in Power Ranger-like armor. There’s nothing subtle or nuanced in The Great Wall : It’s a massive, popcorn-munching, monster-mashing actioner. Nothing more and nothing less.

Can younger viewers walk away with anything positive here? Yes. The film illustrates the importance of working together and learning to trust others. Heroes make great sacrifices for others. And a character of questionable moral background changes his stripes to do what’s right in a time of need.

Still, families that choose to plop down into comfy chairs at the local Cineplex also need to know they’ll face some rough-edged language and a whole lot of screeching, gushing, exploding, sharp-toothed … big .

‘Cause that’s what this one is all about.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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‘The Great Wall’ Review: Matt Damon Battles Monsters, Blockbuster-Audience Boredom

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Matt Damon has earned his action bona fides with The Martian and the Bourne films; veteran Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou ( Raise the Red Lantern, House of Flying Daggers ), doing his first film in English, is a world-class master. (It’s hard to forget his 2008 staging of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.) So it’s exciting just to think of the two teaming up. Reality, sad to say, is a bitch. This co-production between the U.S. and China, the two leading spots on the map for mining gold at box office, is a $150 million mess of muddy 3-D computer effects and backward thinking. Even in the Far East, where major local stars such as Hong Kong’s Andy Lau, are reduced to supporting roles, it still takes a white Hollywood movie star to save the world.

Damon plays William, a 12th-century European mercenary who’s been dragging his ass and a phony ponytail across the deserts of western China looking for the mysterious black powder that can turn citizens of the globe into gun freaks. Aided by his Spanish best-friend-forever Tovar (Pedro Pascal), Good Will is hunting for his fortune. But as they push toward the digitized Great Wall to make a deal, they’re met by a spray of arrows indicating “not so fast, interlopers.” Zhang keeps everything moving in a swirl of color, light and dizzying action. Which helpfully distracts from a plot, credited to three screenwriters, that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

A lot of the actors, including Damon and Pascal, speak in a weirdly accented English that at times makes them sound dubbed. You probably won’t notice because the stilted dialogue is drowned out by shrieking monster attacks. The Tao Tei, as they’re called, look like a combo of dinosaur and orc; according to legend, they pounce like giant cockroaches every 60 years to thin out the human population. Not on Damon’s watch. Tovar and a European turncoat (played by an understandably confused Willem Dafoe) plan an escape. But count on William to stay and fight the good fight against the aliens. He seems to be developing a thing for Lin Mae (Jing Tian), a female leader of the so-called Nameless Order, which includes a way cool team of armed female aerialists. Despite a few hot looks, however, sexy time is not an option for these two. Besides, it’s hard to get it on when these beasties are crawling up the Great Wall, mouths agape and ready to chow down.

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That’s the movie, folks. It plays like like a video game in which the goal is to kill as many of these green-blooded monsters as you can before time’s up. It’s fun for about 10 minutes, and then the tedium seeps in. We do learn that a magnet has the power to lull the creatures to sleep, which is nothing considering that the movie all on its own acts a soporific. Many reviewers in China found it disappointing that all Zhang and Damon came up with is a B-level creature feature with delusions of grandeur. In a move Trump would envy, the Chinese government quickly silenced the naysayers. It’s getting hard out here for a critic.

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The Great Wall Is Wonderfully Ridiculous

If you don’t love The Great Wall , we don’t have much to talk about. Yes, it’s terrible, but it’s lavishly, generously terrible, and even at its worst it isn’t painful — unlike, say, the list of finalists for this year’s Razzie awards. (Try sitting through Zoolander 2 and tell me how bad The Great Wall is.) It’s fun to watch Matt Damon try not to look or sound like Matt Damon, dropping his voice half an octave, sucking in his gut, affecting a manly stoicism. For a while I wondered if he made this movie because he had gambling debts and the Triad was holding his family hostage, but then it hit me that he made it because he could . As an A-list international movie star, he can be a secret agent, an astronaut on Mars, or a fearless warrior in medieval China. You and I can’t be any of those things.

It’s rarely a good idea for white stars to make movies in China in which they save the world with their fighting skills while hordes of Chinese (whose collective salaries don’t equal the star’s) fall by the wayside. But there’s something modest about Damon’s demeanor that lets him get by. He plays a mercenary named William Garin, who’s either English or Irish — I think Irish. In the first sequence, William kills a giant creature we can’t quite see (it’s not clear if this is by design or ineptitude) and, along with his comic-relief Spaniard pal, Tovar (Pedro Pascal), carries its severed limb to a nearby fortress behind the Great Wall.

The beast turns out to be something called a Tao Tei and it’s like a combination reptile and rat with a helmet-head out of Alien . (“What God made those things?” “None that we know.”) The Tao Tei live in Jade Mountain and — I’m reading from my press notes —“rise every 60 years to feed upon humanity and punish mankind’s greed.” I don’t remember how they know it’s because of mankind’s greed. Maybe they just inferred it from feeding upon humanity. The denizens of the fortress are called the Nameless Order and train for 60 years in anticipation of the next Tao Tei uprising. No one says, “Winter is coming,” but that’s the gist.

The Nameless don’t believe one man alone could kill a Tao Tei, so Garin recounts the story: “A swing of the sword,” he says. “The hand fell away clean. The beast fell back into the chasm.” Much of the dialogue sounds like it’s badly translated from Mandarin, but the writers are all American. I guess they watched a lot of wuxia movies and internalized the bad subtitles. (Amazingly enough, the story is credited to Max Brooks, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz.)

In the event you don’t know, wuxia books and movies features martial-arts heroes in ancient China, and The Great Wall ’s director, Zhang Yimou, made a couple of the greatest ever: Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004). His pictures usually have a much cleaner palette, though — I don’t think he has ever had to contend with this much CG. The action isn’t edited so you can see what’s going on, and my 3-D glasses didn’t sharpen the picture. Some of the vistas look computer-generated, too. Perhaps the film was shot in Burbank, like the moon landing.

The setup for the first battle is certainly impressive. Atop the wall, the Nameless Order surveys the charging beasts while men beat man-size drums and, down below, soldiers take big, heavy iron balls and douse them in oil and light them and slingshot them onto the Tao Tei — and we follow the balls all the way down as they go boom . Meanwhile, identically blue-clad female warriors get strapped into harnesses and swing down to lance the creatures — though unfortunately what comes back up is only chewed-up harnesses. A friend I was with said, “Sixty years? They had 60 years and that’s all they could come up with? Send some cheerleaders down on ropes and watch ’em get eaten?”

A young female leader named Lin (Tian Jing, who has a heart-shaped face and looks about 16) forms a bond with William, but the alliance, at first, is uneasy. She fights for her people, she says, while he only looks out for himself. Also, he doesn’t have trust in other people. She says, “A man must learn to trust before he can be trusted.” This obviously hits home, because a short time later he tells Tovar and a second comic-relief character, played by Willem Dafoe, that he’s going to stay and help the Nameless. Apart from debating the social contract with the beauteous Lin, he finds time to buttress the confidence of an inept young soldier. When the kid is wounded, he says, “Brave lad.”

Annoyingly, The Great Wall is another of those movies where you can only stop the monster by killing the queen, who sends out some sort of telekinetic life force. This strikes me as — evolutionarily speaking — very maladaptive. What happens if the queen is just ambling along and trips and breaks her neck? The whole species goes extinct?

Oh, let’s not quibble: The absurdity is what makes it such a hoot-and-a-half. In the climactic shot, two characters swing over hundreds of monsters and blow things up and it looks incredibly fake — but I’d have been disappointed, in a way, if it hadn’t. If it looked like the Death Star exploding, it wouldn’t have fit with the rest of the movie. It had to look cheesy.

There is, as I’ve said, a certain mightiness to this enterprise that transcends what Shakespeare would call the general woe. I can’t predict if anyone will see it (it will probably make most of its money in Asia), but I’m looking forward to The Great Wall II . Maybe Matt could convince Ben to play the Tao Tei queen’s brother who’s out for vengeance.

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The Great Wall Review

17 Feb 2017

103 minutes

The Great Wall

As is perhaps fitting for a film based on

a 13,000-mile-long stone structure, The Great Wall bears a huge weight of expectation. It is the biggest-ever China-Hollywood co-production, the most expensive film shot entirely in China, and arrives at a time when the global industry is increasingly facing towards the East. It’s also the most epic project fêted Chinese director Zhang Yimou has taken on since he directed the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, as well as his first English-language film. No pressure, then.

Matt Damon plays William, a mercenary soldier whose accent suggests he’s from Ireland, or has at least spent a lot of time swigging Guinness in Irish bars. William and his fellow fighter-for-hire Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are poking around the Chinese border in search of valuable “black powder” when they run into an army deployed on the Great Wall to defend China from monsters. Via a witheringly lazy plot device — a guard has lost the key to a cell — they end up getting caught up in the combat.

The army’s fighting techniques seem as influenced by extreme sports as they are war history books.

The army’s fighting techniques seem as influenced by extreme sports as they are war history books — a troupe of lance-wielding, bungee-jumping female warriors provides the film’s most thrilling, rope-twanging spectacle. The acting, though, is largely as rigid as the spears thrusting in and out of leathery monster flesh.

This can’t only be explained away by some of the Chinese cast having to deliver lines in English. Jing Tian, who plays the steely Commander Lin Mei, seems so detached she seems to be living life half a second off the pace of everyone else. Sporting a uniform more suited to a Power Ranger than a medieval soldier, she appears a pixel width away from being an RPG video-game character.

The film was trailed as a cultural mash-up but, being set and filmed in China, the casting of Damon, Pedro Pascal and Willem Dafoe (whose character, Ballard, seems there purely to explain how Commander Lin learned English) is the only element representing the West. Instead, Chinese cultural clichés abound, from speeches about working together to help the greater cause to Olympic-level gymnastics. These are more cause for complaint than the “whitewashing” Damon’s casting supposedly represents. William is not presented as a white knight, rather a mercenary caught in the chaos. A conversation about his past comes across as a tacked-on attempt to make him seem dark and set up his potential redemption but really, he’s not whitewashing; he’s just grey-dull.

The vicious Tao Teis aren’t much more memorable, despite being impressively rendered and bred from the usual Lord Of The Rings /Games Workshop monster farm — the only significant design twists being Chinese-style designs on their foreheads and having eyes on their shoulders. Every major aspect of their behaviour — such as their main vulnerability and communication methods — comes across as shoehorned in, designed to provide a sledgehammer-blatant path for the heroes to follow to overcome them. If William had found a KitKat in his bag we would have no doubt discovered the monsters happen to have a kryptonite-like aversion to chocolatey wafer.

The film, as a landmark China-Hollywood co-op, probably only had to be a decent popcorn action flick to be considered a success, but the only sound louder than the Tao Teis’ screeching is that of square pegs being bashed into round holes. Its artistic failures are unlikely to put a halt to the tilting of the film industry towards China, but The Great Wall doesn’t deserve to be considered the definitive monument to this shift.

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In Theaters and Digital

The great wall - movie review.

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Though it doubles as a bit of a sad commentary on the cultural bias of the American film-goer, there's a big reason Damon is in the film: because the movie cost upwards of $150 million to make; and because Damon will put plenty of American butts in the seats. Plain and simple. Yes, he stands out like a sore thumb, and no, he doesn't ruin the film. Besides, it is silly to be bothered by such anachronisms in a film about monsters.

Now, with that out of the way, let's talk about how badly this film could have gone and why it didn't. First of all, the trailers do the film no justice. In what is typically a death sentence for any film, it is shot almost entirely on a green screen stage. Though some of the CGI is a bit shaky in places, this entire production is an absolutely beautiful symphony of color, sound, action, and legend – something we don't get from the trailers. Sure, it's as dumb as hell and about as subtle as an anvil to the side of the head, but beneath Zhang's skillful hand, the beauty of violence and destruction flow like ancient Chinese poetry. Green screen productions aren't supposed to look this seamless.

The film's opening frames tout the greatness of the actual Great Wall of China with title cards that remind us that the wall is more than 5,000 miles long and took more than 1700 years to build. Think about that for a minute. Had we Americans begun building our border wall when we first declared independence from England, it would currently only stretch from San Diego to the edge of New Mexico.

Title cards further tell us that no one really knows why the wall was built, but that this story will focus on one of the many legends that surround the wall: that it was built to keep out the evil Tao Tei, a breed of ancient, mythical beasts living deep within the Jade Mountain thats rises every 60 years for eight days to feed upon humanity and to punish mankind's greed.

At about the same that the Tao Tei are awakening from their 60-year slumber, man-bunned barbarian and master archer William Garin (Matt Damon) and his sidekick Tovar (Pedro Pascal) stumble upon the heavily-guarded wall fortress while searching the China countryside for the fabled black powder that they hope to take back with them as the "holy grail" of war, a deadly treasure for which they are willing to die.

Having surrendered themselves to the army of unknown warriors called the Nameless Order, William and Tovar are kept shackled and are interrogated at a tribunal led by a trio of leaders inside the stone barricade. But before one can say "I'll huff and I'll puff," the Tao Tei are on the offensive as they attack the wall in massive numbers.

What ensues is an epic battle to protect China's homeland from the invading monsters whose three-tiered attack force and telepathic mentality might just prove too much for China's defenses and may put William and Tovar's honor above wealth and fame.

Undoubtedly, most of the film's best moments come from Zhang's spectacularly choreographed battle sequences. Female acrobatic warriors called the Crane Corps – led by Commmander Lin (Jing Tian) – seemingly fly through the air as they battle the raptor-like creatures. In addition, well-trained archers fling their deadly barrage of arrows with surgical skill, while another platoon catapults huge, flaming spiked balls over the wall to wreak mass destruction on the herds of attacking monsters. They are all commanded by a color-coded signal corps who beckon the forces with carefully timed tympanic drum beats. Taken with a healthy suspension of disbelief, this is all just fun stuff to watch. I highly recommend checking out the 3D iMax version of the film as it is the best way to experience the fantasy war action – which is the only real reason to see this picture in the first place. Well, that and for the monsters – thousands of them... and those teeth.

The Great Wall is a violent film with plenty of gruesome monster deaths and buckets of green blood. It is also a beautiful love letter to Chinese culture which celebrates color, sound, myth, and the allure of legendary tales. You'll be awed by Zhang's foray into commercial cinema.

[tab title="Details"]

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of fantasy action violence Runtime: 103 mins Director : Yimou Zhang Writer: Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro Cast: Matt Damon, Tian Jing, Willem Dafoe Genre : Fantasy | Action Tagline: 1700 years to build. 5500 miles long. What were they trying to keep out? Memorable Movie Quote: "This is the first war I've seen worth fighting for" Theatrical Distributor: Universal Pictures Official Site: http://www.thegreatwallmovie.com/ Release Date: February 17, 2017 DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: No details available. Synopsis : Starring global superstar Matt Damon and directed by one of the most breathtaking visual stylists of our time, Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), Legendary's The Great Wall tells the story of an elite force making a valiant stand for humanity on the world's most iconic structure. The first English-language production for Yimou is the largest film ever shot entirely in China. The Great Wall also stars Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe and Andy Lau.

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THE GREAT WALL

"ridiculous fun".

What You Need To Know:

(P, B, C, ACap, So, L, VV, M) Light mixed worldview with some moral elements, hero says he once worked for the Pope and his friend says they need time to pray when it appears they’re going to be executed, mixed with some anti-capitalist, pro-socialist symbolism opposing greed and favoring sacrificing for the collective (movie is a Chinese-American production) but also sacrificing for the common good; eight obscenities and no profanities; lots of strong action violence includes numerous battle scenes between Chinese forces on top of and within the Great Wall, rampaging alien beasts, the aliens are four-legged and green with vicious teeth, flaming cannonballs, leaping acrobatic soldiers attached to bungee cords, hundreds of archers shoot arrows are all regular parts of the movie, lead mercenary teaches other soldiers to kill the alien beasts using spears and swords aimed directly at their throats or eyes, one battle scene features beasts getting impaled with arrows and spears and includes green blood flying everywhere, another scene features sharp blades that slice alien bodies in half, a soldier heroically allowing himself to explode using gunpowder to save the day against the beasts via sacrifice, a human soldier is shot in the neck with an arrow, and creatures are seen eating some of the soldiers in quick glimpses; no sex; no nudity; no alcohol; no smoking or drugs; and, greed but it’s rebuked thru the movie’s notion of sacrificing oneself for the collective.

More Detail:

THE GREAT WALL stars Matt Damon in a science fiction adventure about a medieval mercenary looking to steal gunpowder from China who gets captured and then becomes a hero by leading the Chinese in a battle against hordes of marauding alien beasts attacking the Great Wall. THE GREAT WALL is ridiculous fun, mixing medieval battle movies, Chinese culture and science fiction together into a non-stop, action-packed romp, but caution is advised for older children.

The movie starts by showing a small band of rugged, heavily bearded medieval mercenaries led by William (Matt Damon), The mercenaries are in China trying to steal and smuggle out the recent invention of gunpowder. They are hiding in a cave from Chinese forces seeking to punish them when they are attacked suddenly by a shadowy alien creature, and William saves them all by cutting the creature’s arm off, sending it hurtling off a cliff.

The next day, William and one other mercenary ride away to further evade their pursuers, only to run into the Great Wall of China. They find themselves stopped by a hailstorm of arrows shot from the top of the wall by an army of archers. Captured, they are in danger of being put to death by female Commander Lin (Tian Jing), when suddenly thousands of rampaging alien monsters attack. The Chinese soldiers fight off the alien invaders with flaming cannonballs, arrows, swords, spears, and acrobatic diving female soldiers in an impressive battle sequence.

William is cut loose of his prisoner bindings by another Westerner named Ballard (Willem Dafoe), who’s been living at the Wall as a prisoner for 25 years for trying to smuggle gunpowder too. William springs into action, saving numerous soldiers from attack. He shows them how to defeat the beasts: by spearing or shooting arrows into their mouths and thus striking their hearts.

William and his partner are suddenly heroes. The rest of the movie consists of impressive battle sequences and fun banter as the two Westerners and Ballard learn to adapt to the Chinese culture of team thinking and away from their selfish natures in order to survive and win the battle.

THE GREAT WALL is ridiculous fun, mixing medieval battle movies, Chinese culture and science fiction together into a non-stop action-packed romp. It’s nice to see Damon take such a major step in a fun direction, away from his usually serious-minded movies. Also, the culture clash friendship that forms between William and Commander Lin teeters on the edge of romance without ever crossing from friendship.

It’s refreshing to see a woman given full respect in a movie, and not treated as a mere love interest or sex object. This also reflects Chinese culture’s hesitance to show kissing or any romantic or sexual content.

The dialogue is wooden and direct at first, with an overt expository quality that makes the movie seem like it’s going to be worthy of mockery before the first big battle. From there, however, the script loosens up a lot, with frequent funny asides and banter, and a self-aware sense of humor about how ludicrous the situations in the story all are.

While the monsters are vicious, the writers and director have managed to keep everything pitched at a level that older children and teenagers can easily enjoy without being traumatized. Basically, THE GREAT WALL is more like an Indiana Jones movie than anything else.

The movie shows the value of turning away from selfishness and of the admirable quality of sacrificing oneself to save others. There is a positive Christian, moral reference to prayer, combined with some symbolic anti-capitalist moments calling out greed and extolling the collective. There’s also lots of action violence and brief foul language. Overall, however, THE GREAT WALL is an entertaining time at the movies for teenagers and adults, with some caution required.

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The Great Gatsby review – a literary classic becomes a Broadway dud

The Broadway Theatre, New York

F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel makes an underwhelming transfer to the stage in a bombastic yet misfiring new production

The musical currently playing at the Broadway Theatre, twirling drunkenly in 1920s opulence, is The Great Gatsby.

Though, perhaps, the latest revival of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel should be renamed The Gimmicky Gatsby. An attempt to evoke awe through hyper-extended dance intervals and flaccid sets, this remount prioritizes a good time over any purposeful recreation of the American classic.

This Gatsby, directed by Marc Bruni, still follows veteran Nick Carraway (Noah J Ricketts) as he moves near Long Island, New York, to chase the post-Great War high. It’s a chance to “misbehave” as the musical’s punchy opening number lays bare with music by Jason Howland.

Nick happens upon the Gatsby (a talented Jeremy Jordan), who has his sights set on Daisy (Eva Noblezada), his unrequited love. But Daisy is already married to Tom (John Zdrojeski), a hot-tempered brute drowning in old money.

The production splashes in excess, but of the Las Vegas residency kind. Golden-lacquered set pieces and a dizzying projection screen recreate the Gatsby mansion (and a bevy of other locations). The “nouveau riche” mansion isn’t as opulent or lush as one might imagine, feeling closer in spirit to a mega-church.

The book by Kait Kerrigan swings for laughs, which begin to thin by the musical’s second act. “Who knew Manhattan was so expensive,” Carraway says, slapstick-style. Kerrigan is also more interested in the Gatsby-Daisy love story than any rigorous analysis of class or the American dream, with songs bookending the colliding romances.

Nathan Tysen’s lyrics are mostly expositional, trying to fill gaps in the story. Gatsby’s ballad For Her about building his wealth to inevitably net Daisy doesn’t evoke love so much as justification.

All of Howland’s songs, a cascading list featuring the brassy fixtures of 20s jazz, are sung beautifully by Gatsby’s talented cast. Noblezada, fresh off a starring role in Hadestown, is a delicate Daisy, bringing powerhouse vocals when describing her commitment to marriage in For Better or Worse. But ultimately, much of Howland’s music melts together, not quite framing emotional hilltops.

Choreography by Dominique Kelley is apt, capturing the era’s giddy nature with the occasional Charleston. Missteps in story and direction would be more or less fine if the show itself was entertaining. But it’s only tepidly so.

Kerrigan’s book tries to capture all of Gatsby with a thudding recall. There’s the billboard featuring spectacles, the infamous Green Light, and, of course, the old v new money divide. There’s also a pointed underlining of Gatsby’s tango with the black market, set to a matrix-style, trench coat dance number titled Shady. But it all never quite blends together.

Under Bruni’s direction, Kerrigan jerks us through a rotary of locations and corresponding plot events, often leaving dead air as characters zoom away in their on-stage sports cars.

Hyper-fixation on the love story also doesn’t work in a world where Gatsby’s central characters are underdeveloped and rife with cliches. Kerrigan’s Gatsby punctuates every sentence with an “old sport”, a grating tagline.

Tom is an abusive antagonist through and through. But moments of his physical violence toward Daisy and his mistress Myrtle (Sara Chase) are sped through due to issues in Bruni’s pacing. When Myrtle’s nose is broken by Tom in a seedy uptown apartment, humor immediately plops in, a tonal bust.

Of course, the flatness of these characters could signal towards their glibness in Scott’s original text. They are vapidly bourgeois after all. But this revival doesn’t seem to be in on the joke, attempting to carve out a genuine spark and interest in Nick and Jordan (Samantha Pauly plays an old money golfer who waves off marriage). We know so little about either of them, it’s hard to truly care when their relationship veers off-course.

As the musical wraps with a flurry of the novel’s best quotes and the inevitable lesson that the rich are callous and horrible, it’s clear this Gatsby attempts to throw it all at the wall, indulge in more of everything.

Too bad none of it quite sticks.

F Scott Fitzgerald

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Review: ‘Grenfell’ Listens to the Survivors of a Towering Inferno

At St. Ann’s Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved.

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An actress in a green jacket and jeans stands on a cardboard box. She’s speaking to an audience around her. Two actors hold boxes behind her.

By Laura Collins-Hughes

The notion of creating a safe space for an audience to experience a work of theater tends to provoke the tough-guy purists, because it sounds like coddling. Shouldn’t the stage be a place of daring, unhampered by any content revelations that might spoil the surprise?

Presumably, anyone who arrives at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn to see “ Grenfell: in the words of survivors ,” a tense and enthralling documentary play about a 2017 residential fire in West London that killed 72 people, is aware of the potentially upsetting subject matter. But before the storytelling even starts, the actors in this National Theater production set about making a safe space with a preamble whose clear language and kind tone are not the least bit soppy.

“We do want to reassure you that we will not be showing any images of fire,” one cast member says from the stage, which is surrounded on all sides by the audience. “If you need to leave even for a short break, our front of house staff will show you out, and if there’s an actor in the way when you want to leave, don’t worry, we will move.”

Another adds: “If you do leave, you’re welcome to come back.”

Our humanity tended to, the characters begin their recollections — nothing traumatic, not yet, just simple, sun-dappled memories. Because before Grenfell Tower, a 24-story public housing block, became a cautionary tale about the dangers of government penny-pinching and corporate corner-cutting, it was people’s home.

Thinking back on the apartments that had been their sanctuaries, they miss the freedom of life above the tree line, the view of the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, the quiet when they’d shut their door and leave the noise of the city outside. They miss the community of good neighbors.

“When I got my flat in Grenfell Tower,” Edward Daffarn (Michael Shaeffer) recalls, “my heart told me it was going to be OK. I was really, really happy.”

As the fast-moving fire began consuming the building in the wee hours of June 14, the residents’ sense of their homes as inherently safe spaces was so deep-rooted that it kept many from recognizing the danger. So did the conventional — and in this case, egregiously inapt — guidance from authorities about remaining in place if a fire is not in your apartment.

Sparely staged by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike, and performed by a superlative, much-doubling cast, this play by Gillian Slovo is activist theater. Using interviews with Grenfell residents and testimony from a public inquiry, it makes the case that whether people lived or died that night depended hugely on chance, and on whether and how soon a person’s urge to flee overrode the ingrained habit of obedience to official advice.

“My husband was adamant that the procedure was that we were to stay put,” Hanan Wahabi (Mona Goodwin) says, “but my son, Zak, said, ‘We are not doing that, Mum, we are getting out.’”

Then he scooped up his little sister and left their ninth-floor apartment. Hanan and her husband followed.

The play argues powerfully, and affectingly, that the marginalization of the Grenfell residents — many of them low- and middle-income immigrants and people of color in a plush, trendy London borough — not only played a part in the emergency response to the fire but also created the conditions for such a disaster.

Likewise politicians’ zeal for deregulation, the virtues of which the former prime minister David Cameron extols in a video clip, and for the removal of red tape — like a rule inspired by the Great Fire of London in 1666, which forbade using combustible materials on building exteriors. The cladding on Grenfell Tower, installed by a company that had made the cheapest bid for the 2015-16 refurbishment, was highly flammable.

“Grenfell” will teach you about that cladding — there is a diagram, shown on the video screens that hang above the audience — and its red-flagged safety testing. (Set and costumes are by Georgia Lowe, video by Akhila Krishnan.) Other renovation details are similarly alarming, like renumbering the floors so that apartment numbers no longer matched them, creating an obstacle for firefighters.

Toggling between these drier, more cerebral sections and the memories of 10 residents — each vivid, eloquent, endearing — the play regulates the production’s anxiety level, keeping it from overwhelming us.

It is remarkable, though, how much suspense is built into the performance, when the title has already told us that all of the people we’re listening to made it out alive. At one particularly fraught point in Act 2, as the fire raged and a few characters had yet to escape down stairwell paths suggested by slender lines of projected light, I wondered if one of them was going to turn out to be a ghost.

Arriving at the height of the theater season, “Grenfell” is the opposite of razzle-dazzle: serious, respectful, blood-boiling, aggrieved — and, over the course of its three hours, both gripping and important.

Grenfell: in the words of survivors Through May 12 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org ; Running time: 3 hours.

An earlier version of this article misstated the kind of light that is used when characters in the show escape down a stairwell. It is projected light, not lighting by the lighting designer.

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COMMENTS

The Great Wall movie review & film summary (2017)
The Great Wall. Chinese/American co-produced action-fantasy "The Great Wall" doesn't feel like a McDonald's-ified version of a Chinese film. True, when square-jawed Matt Damon fights alien monsters side-by-side with Chinese soldiers, the film sometimes feels like a spectacular big-budget action epic with a golden-age western-style hero.
The Great Wall
Rated 0.5/5 Stars • Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 04/21/24 Full Review Pedro Henrique C The Great Wall has a confusing story but it has some good action scenes, the CGI, my God, is horror lol Rated 2 ...
Review: Matt Damon Battles Clusters of Monsters in 'The Great Wall
The Great Wall. Directed by Yimou Zhang. Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Thriller. PG-13. 1h 43m. By Manohla Dargis. Feb. 16, 2017. Snarling digital monsters, a glowering Matt Damon and battalions of ...
The Great Wall (2016)
The Great Wall: Directed by Yimou Zhang. With Matt Damon, Tian Jing, Willem Dafoe, Andy Lau. In ancient China, a group of European mercenaries encounters a secret army that maintains and defends the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures.
The Great Wall Movie Review
Overall, "The Great Wall" is a visually impressive film with solid action sequences and stunning visuals. However, the casting of Matt Damon as the lead character leaves a lingering feeling of missed potential and the sense that the film could have been even better with an Asian actor in the role. Show more. sjb Parent of 6, 9 and 12-year-old.
The Great Wall
When a mercenary warrior (Matt Damon) is imprisoned within The Great Wall, he discovers the mystery behind one of the greatest wonders of our world. As wave after wave of marauding beasts besiege the massive structure, his quest for fortune turns into a journey toward heroism as he joins a huge army of elite warriors to confront this unimaginable and seemingly unstoppable force.
The Great Wall review
When The Great Wall was announced, the Chinese cinema box office was on a never-ending upwards trajectory, with audience revenue growing nearly 60-fold in just over a decade to 2015, and cinema ...
The Great Wall
The fact a Western actor is leading an Asian film should be uncomfortable, but in a film this bad, its hard to care. Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 21, 2022. The Great Wall is the ...
'The Great Wall' Review
Release date: Feb 17, 2017. Telling the fantastical story of a massive battle waged to stop paranormal beasts from invading China, The Great Wall is easily the least interesting and involving ...
The Great Wall Review: China Is the Film's True Hero
Read Matt Goldberg's The Great Wall review; Zhang Yimou's film stars Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Jing Tian, Willem Dafoe, Hanyu Zhang, and Andy Lau.
The Great Wall (film)
The Great Wall (Chinese: 長城) is a 2016 monster film directed by Zhang Yimou, with a screenplay by Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy, from a story by Max Brooks, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz.An American and Chinese co-production starring Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, and Andy Lau, the plot centers on two European mercenary warriors (Matt Damon and Pedro ...
The Great Wall Review
The Great Wall can be best summed up as an interesting-in-theory, but only partly successful-in-action experiment in blending Hollywood popcorn movie tropes with Chinese historical epic filmmaking sensibilities. Thanks to a surprisingly short runtime (compared to most blockbusters nowadays) and elements that lend it unintended camp value (see ...
The Great Wall
Movie Review. When he started his trek with a band of some thirty other fighters, William was little more than a 15th-century mercenary. He was a very good one, mind you, a master archer. ... The Great Wall is all about big. This is one of the first co-produced efforts blending Chinese cinematic sweep and Hollywood CGI-fueled star power. It ...
Peter Travers: 'The Great Wall' Movie Review
Besides, it's hard to get it on when these beasties are crawling up the Great Wall, mouths agape and ready to chow down. That's the movie, folks. It plays like like a video game in which the ...
The Great Wall Movie Review: Damon Epic Is Divinely Terrible
In the event you don't know, wuxia books and movies features martial-arts heroes in ancient China, and The Great Wall's director, Zhang Yimou, made a couple of the greatest ever: Hero (2002 ...
The Great Wall Review
12A. Original Title: The Great Wall. As is perhaps fitting for a film based on. a 13,000-mile-long stone structure, The Great Wall bears a huge weight of expectation. It is the biggest-ever China ...
The Great Wall
The film's opening frames tout the greatness of the actual Great Wall of China with title cards that remind us that the wall is more than 5,000 miles long and took more than 1700 years to build. Think about that for a minute.
Movie Review: THE GREAT WALL
Movie review of THE GREAT WALL starring Matt Damon, Ting Jian, Pedro Pascal, Andy Lau, Willem Dafoe and directed by Zhang Yimou. Rating: PG-13 Stars: Matt Damon, Ting Jian, Pedro Pascal, Andy Lau ...
The Great Wall movie review: not to be torn down
The Great Wall movie review: not to be torn down. by MaryAnn Johanson. Fri, Feb 17, 2017. 8 comments. MaryAnn's quick take: Plain pure fun. At its best, it's Lord of the Rings meets Aliens, with incredible imaginative grandeur and genuinely breathtaking 3D depth. I'm "biast" (pro): love a good fantasy action movie.
MOVIE REVIEW: The Great Wall
"The Great Wall" is an imposing creature feature that stands as a three-headed glamour project. You have an A-list star venturing overseas for international credibility and a splashy director landing his official English-language debut. Aiming higher in aspiration is a ... 2017, 4 STARS, MOVIE REVIEW Don Shanahan February 14, 2017 Classic ...
The Great Wall
Verified Audience. No All Critics reviews for The Great Wall. Rotten Tomatoes, home of the Tomatometer, is the most trusted measurement of quality for Movies & TV. The definitive site for Reviews ...
THE GREAT WALL
THE GREAT WALL is ridiculous fun, mixing medieval battle movies, Chinese culture and science fiction together into a non-stop action-packed romp. The dialogue is wooden and direct at first, but the movie picks up during and after the first big battle scene. The movie promotes sacrifice and even prayer, but it's mixed with some anti-capitalist ...
The Great Wall
The Great Wall (1962) View more photos Movie Info. Synopsis China's first emperor uses brutality to unite his nation and begins construction on his country's most impressive man-made achievement.
The Great Gatsby review
F Scott Fitzgerald's novel makes an underwhelming transfer to the stage in a bombastic yet misfiring new production The musical currently playing at the Broadway Theatre, twirling drunkenly in ...
Review: 'Grenfell' Sees Tower Fire Through Residents' Eyes
Performances in N.Y.C. Advertisement Supported by Critic's Pick At St. Ann's Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved. By Laura Collins-Hughes The ...

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