‘The Great Wall’ on HBO: Forget the Story, This Film Is a Visual Feast

When Universal released The Great Wall back in February, there was a lot of misdirection going on. The film’s paltry North American box-office returns ($45 million off of a $150 million production budget) belied the fact that there were boatloads more to be made overseas (the worldwide box office ended up at a shade under $300 million).

Matt Damon as the white Hollywood would-be savior felt all-too-familiar and wildly tone-deaf to the current era, but the on-screen product was something slightly different, with Damon’s character less the golden-haired salvation-bringer he might have been. Director Zhang Yimou defended the casting when he told Entertainment Weekly, “Our film is not about the construction of the Great Wall. Matt Damon is not playing a role that was originally conceived for a Chinese actor. The arrival of his character in our story is an important plot point. There are five major heroes in our story and he is one of them — the other four are all Chinese. The collective struggle and sacrifice of these heroes are the emotional heart of our film.”

But perhaps the biggest misdirection at work in The Great Wall is the idea that it ought to be judged on its story. Do so if you must, but you’ll only be missing the trees for the forest. The central story in The Great Wall could be summed up like this: a pair of European mercenaries end up stumbling upon a Chinese military order along the Great Wall, where the Chinese warriors and these few Euro doofs team up to ward off the regular attacks from big, otherworldly CGI monsters.

Sorry, to repeat, The Great Wall takes us back in time to the ancient Song dynasty in China all so we can battle against big, gross, Lovecraftian monsters. Any interest in the actual story beyond this point feels like trying to drum up interest in the latest Transformers movie. What exactly are you trying to engage with.

There is one vastly important difference between The Great Wall and a Transformers movie, of course, and that’s the fact that the visuals in The Great Wall actually compensate for the deficits in story. Transformers has Michael Bay and his muddled typhoons of metal and megabytes. Yimou, on the other hand, is a legitimate visionary whose pageantry in service of a dumb story is still pretty damn good pageantry.

It takes about ten seconds for the above scene to sell you on Yimou’s skill with a set piece. The wide canvass, dazzling use of color, and balletic movement are his signatures. He’s been making movies for 30 years now, since Red Sorghum took the top prize at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival. He began to cross over with films like Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad, and then in 2004 — two years after it opened in China and was Oscar-nominated as China’s foreign-language submission — Hero played to upwards of $50 million at the box-office. It was a knockout, and Yimou’s divine sense of pageantry became known in America.

Yimou also managed to imprint his artistry on America — and indeed the world — with the opening ceremonies to the 2008 Summer Olympics, a presentation that is still as breathtaking as it was that night.

So my strong advice when The Great Wall premieres on HBO tonight is to watch it, do your best to ignore those computer-generated monsters and whatever storyline Matt Damon’s character is trudging his way through, and just bask in the colors and movement and scope of Zhang Yimou’s visuals. You won’t be sorry.

Where to stream The Great Wall