Taking the arm with them, the pair are then quickly captured by Chinese soldiers and taken to the Great Wall where they are interrogated by General Shao (Zhang Hanyu), the leader of a top-secret military group known as The Nameless Order. Although most of the men are killed in the battle, William slices one of the creature’s arms off, which allows him and Tovar to make their escape. Opening with a band of European mercenaries led by William (Damon) and Tovar (Pedro Pascal from Netflix’s Narcos) making their way across China in search of Chinese black powder, Wall ups the ante fairly early on when the team encounters a deadly monster in a cave.
And while Damon is indeed white and heroic, at the end of the day, his character is the one who ends up getting schooled in the art of Song Dynasty-era monster slaying by Wall’s many badass Chinese characters (including one who is also a woman!) so, I can live with that. Wall isn’t perfect, but I’m happy to report that Yimou hasn’t watered down his patented blend of high drama and wildly-cinematic Chinese Wuxia (martial arts) set-pieces one bit in his first English-language epic.
Then I caught Wall’s longer, more nuanced pre-DVD release trailer online last week and totally caved. And although I love Damon as an actor and have been a huge fan of Yimou’s since my film school days, I decided that perhaps the best way to protest the release of yet another Hollywood-ized “whitey-saves-the-insert-ethnic-group-here” blockbuster was to boycott the film entirely.
#Pluraleyes 4 movie#
When I first heard that the the biggest director in China – Zhang Yimou, the Fifth Generation master behind such Oscar-nominated classics as Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, and Hero – was directing whiter-than-white Matt Damon in an epic, period monster movie set in China entitled The Great Wall, the words “white savior narrative” came quickly to mind.
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