Hacker Cinema
The Great Wall
2016 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Zhang Yimou
European mercenaries searching for black powder become embroiled in the defense of the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures.
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7 comments on Hacker News
The same way you stand out now. There are giant budget movies out there that are total trash compared to, say, The Odyssey. One that comes to mind that even had Matt Damon is The Great Wall. Such a huge budget and stacked cast (Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe) but a garbage movie. The tools being available to you isn't what make a you super.
The EU is just about building up to the task of proper self-defence against Russia, and China is not at all interested in a world order except as it feels necessary to protect domestic order. So they do things like border-pushing against India, the nine-island line, wars of words with Japan, and surveillance of overseas Chinese nationals, but other than that they are a long way from anything like the European colonial or world war era.
(IMO there has actually been a retreat from China trying to do propaganda "please like us" adventures overseas in the past few years. Peaked round about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_(film) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin - second highest grossing film worldwide of 2021! For a Korean War movie?!)
> If The Great Wall had turned out to be the massive hit everyone was expecting, this process might have continued. But The Great Wall was not a hit. It was a massive flop—in China, America, and everywhere else.
OK, I don't go the the movies a lot [1] so am generally unaware of much of what is in theaters, but I do watch a lot of TV live (as opposed to on DVR) on channels that have ads and on which studios run lots of ads for the movies that they expect to be big, so I'm usually aware of what is opening that the studios are expecting to be big.
I don't recall ever hearing anything about this movie before reading that article. Was there something anemic about their advertising in the US? Or were the ads just so forgettable that I did see them but completely ignored or forgot them?
[1] My complete movie theater history for the last 20 years: American Beauty, Gladiator, second two Matrix movies, the three Lord of the Rings movies, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Wild Wild West (by accident...was trying for Star Wars and went into the wrong theater), How to Train Your Dragon 2, How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, and Avengers: Endgame.
If The Great Wall (starring Matt Damon) is any indication, be prepared for a near future where Chinese blockbusters will compete against Hollywood blockbusters for audiences.
China is the only movie market which can afford the same budgets as Hollywood. The storytelling and CGI isn't quite there yet but it will be - it's a matter of when, not if.
As a neutral third party, I'm pretty excited to see this clash of east-west ideas
Great wall is pretty much a bs produced by some Chinese billionaire together with the nationally treasured director Zhang Yimo, who pretty much has little idea of making good commercial movie.
> letting Westerners steal their cultural treasures
I cannot see where this comes from. Is there any stealing at all?... The movie Great Wall uses Great Wall in a way that is trade-mark hollywood, i.e., purely symbolic, none of cultural connection at all. The story of Great Wall can be made on almost any world famous building/artifact... If that counts a steal, then hollywood cannot make anything not stealing...
>"The Great Wall"
You might be the only one, it lost money in the US and was panned by critics. And that was a big budget movie made to prove China can compete with Hollywood. It can't (yet).
America is very safe in these kinds of industries.
Baidu. Tencent. Foxconn. Didi.
Think of the last Chinese movie you enjoyed that wasn't Ip Man
"The Great Wall"