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But the white characters other than Damon’s are unreconstructed scoundrels, and although William initially stuns the Nameless Order with a display of his unparalleled archery skills, he’s often just along for the ride, outclassed by the Chinese characters in terms of both military strategy and moral fortitude. Zhang called it a movie with four Chinese heroes, but with the exception of Commander Lin, their stories seem to have been gutted even more thoroughly than William’s. audiences of the burden of identifying with its Chinese protagonists.
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It is, indisputably, a movie that inserts white characters into the story to relieve U.S. But its politics aren’t so easily nailed down they’re slippery, verging on incoherent. None of this is to ignore The Great Wall’s politics by taking refuge in aestheticism. Even after six writers, including The Last Samurai’s Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, finished with the script, there’s no compelling reason for William to be at the center of this story, and Damon acts like he doesn’t know why he’s there, either. (For an epic fantasy, The Great Wall is startlingly short, barely over 90 minutes without the closing credits.) There either needed to more scenes centering on William or, better yet, none. There are undoubtedly more scenes devoted to William than any other single character, but it still feels like the material pertaining to him has been cut in half. Although they managed to talk their way out of being promptly executed, William and Pascal’s Tovar spend most of the Nameless Order’s first battle against the Tao Tei tied up on a parapet, looking on in silent awe as the order’s color-coded troops deploy a dazzling array of combat strategies against their mythological foe.
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It’s true that we enter The Great Wall’s story through the eyes of Damon’s William, but he’s almost immediately sidelined once we meet the Nameless Order, the Chinese forces under the command of Jing Tian’s Commander Lin. As a filmmaker who has been making movies in the government-controlled Chinese film industry for decades, however, Zhang Yimou is adept at the art of subversion, or at least of simultaneously serving multiple masters.