BEFORE: This is the fifth film in a row with Willem Dafoe, which puts him in good shape for the round-up at the end of the year. After tomorrow, I think he'll be in the lead for 2019 with 6 appearances. Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson have each been in 5 films seen in 2019, Oscar Isaac's made 4 appearances so far, and so have Julie Delpy, Steve Carell and Diane Lane, but there's a lot of this year still to come, anything can happen. James Franco's only been in 3 films, but 5 more are coming up, so there's not much point in totalling everything up yet.
This is another film that maybe should have been watched in January, it could have slipped in between "Suburbicon" and "Promised Land", but I missed the Matt Damon connection - maybe this aired on premium cable just a bit too late. Anyway I'm right on the cusp of several super-hero fantasy films, which of course have exaggertated action and usually aren't meant to be taken very seriously, so perhaps this one does fit in a lot better here in March. I can't really put together some kind of "March Monster Madness" chain, because two other films that feature monster-like creatures have now been pushed into April with the addition of the extra Willem Dafoe films, but hey, at least my schedule lines up better with the calendar now.
THE PLOT: 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.
AFTER: Yeah, this is sort of what I figured - forget everything you've been taught about human history if you want to enjoy this one, just kind of turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, or else those pesky questions will keep you up all night. There's the real reason why someone built the Great Wall of China, and then there was a screenwriter who said, "Hey, what if they really built it to keep out a horde of savage alien monsters." Really, that person deserves your pity more than your admiration. The poster for the film points out that the Great Wall took 1,700 years to build - so does that sound like something that was needed very quickly, to deal with an ongoing alien invasion? "Wait, aliens, please give us a few more centuries before you attack, because our wall is almost done..."
There's no specific year mentioned here, to describe when this allegedly took place, but Hollywood for some reason just LOVES to include Asian characters to get gunpowder into a story way before it was invented. And hey, as long as they never mention the date, you can't say that the Chinese people DIDN'T have things like black powder grenades, right? For extra ridiculousness, the Chinese army here is also seen employing things like bungee-jumping, crude hot-air balloons and giant harpoon-shooting cannons. Right. Matt Damon plays a mercenary soldier who traveled from Europe in search of the mysterious powder, and then can't believe what other technological marvels exist in China, nor the seriousness of their battle against an alien horde.
Actually, it's a bit unclear whether the monsters came from the meteor that landed, or whether they were living inside the mountain that it struck. The Chinese folk tales are a little muddied, or maybe something got lost in the translation. All they seem to know is that every 60 years, the monsters attack, and they try to be ready with their long-range weapons fired from atop their Giant Wall, which is 5,500 miles long - but does it really need to be, if the monsters only attack in this one spot? That means that 5,499 miles of the wall are really useless and maybe didn't need to be built? And then why doesn't the wall go from one end to the other, and doesn't go, say, all around the territory of China, just to be on the safe side? Gotta call a NITPICK POINT on this, I think.
Also, why the hell do the monsters attack on such a predictable schedule, every 60 years on the dot? That just gives their prey time to get prepared, so where's the strategy in that? OK, so this time they attacked a week early, which could mean that the horde is getting smarter, but then why did it take them hundreds of years to come up with that little gem? If they really wanted to catch the Chinese army off guard, they should have attacked a year early, or after 30 years instead of 60. Maybe the aliens have a 59 year and 51-week hibernation cycle? Possible, but now I feel like I'm filling in the gaps that a screenwriter couldn't be bothered to worry about.
The monsters - the Tao Tieh - remind me of the Nexu from "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones", only without the fur and with green scales instead, and with more teeth - as a reptilian horde they're reminding me of something else, and it's not the Xenomorphs from "Alien", it's something else... One online database compares them to one of the Kaiju from "Pacific Rim", but I don't think that's it, either. Maybe giant versions of the "Gremlins"? Smaller version of "Cloverfield"? It'll come to me, probably when I least expect it. Wait, I think I have it, they're like the Brood from the X-Men comics, which were sometimes colored green, and sometimes brown.
This film was released in February 2017, and that means it was probably in production long before the 2016 election, so as much as I'd like to draw an analogy to our President's proposed border wall and the Great Wall of China as depicted in this film, it just wouldn't be fair. OK, whatever - clearly the film depicts Trump's worst nightmare, with the Tao Tei representing the Mexicans trying to get into the U.S. and devour us. I mean, take our jobs and be a total drain on our country's resources. But it's worth noting that the Great Wall here was only so effective in stopping them, because aliens (illegal or extra-terrestrial) can always dig a tunnel right under the wall! I'm pretty sure the makers of this film didn't intend to make a veiled comment about immigration issues, but there you go.
Look, I hope this doesn't sound racially insensitive or culturally inappropriate in any way, but can we as an American society figure out what to do with Chinese names? Like, I KNOW that their culture treats the names differently, and their first name is their family name, and their second name is their given (or personal) name, but can't we have some consistency in the way we deal with this? Wikipedia lists the lead actress as Jing Tian, but the IMDB lists her as Tian Jing, and I just want to know what to properly call her. Why is this so difficult for us to get it straight? It's twice as confusing as it needs to be, because the West hasn't landed on one simple strategy for dealing with this, and I don't think switching back and forth, or calling her two different names in print, is doing enough. Please, can we all just come together on this and figure it the F*CK out? I'll use whichever method we can all agree on, but we've all got to agree on one method first - are we reversing their names, or not?
Also starring Matt Damon (last seen in "Promised Land"), Tian Jing (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Pedro Pascal (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Andy Lau, Hanyu Zhang, Han Lu, Eddie Peng, Xuan Huang, Kenny Lin, Karry Wang, Ryan Zheng, Cheney Chen, Pilou Asbaek (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Numan Acar (last seen in "12 Strong"), Johnny Cicco (also last seen in "Promised Land"), Stephen Chang, Vicky Yu, Bing Liu.
RATING: 4 out of 10 screaming arrows
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