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Matt damon the great wall movie movie#
The people who have seen this movie can't stop talking about the accent. In his review for New York, David Edelstein notes that Damon plays a character who is "either English or Irish - I think Irish." Buzzfeed's Alison Willmore aptly describes Damon's performance as "unplaceably-accented." In USA Today, critic Brian Truitt sniffed out some Scottish in there and a hint of "original-recipe Damon." Slate's Sam Adams was even more succinct in his assessment: "the accent, whatever it’s meant to be, comes and goes." As a movie about Matt Damon doing a weird accent, it's a masterpiece.Īnd, unsurprisingly, critics have taken notice. (One sequence involving whistling arrows is particularly evocative.) As a document of Hollywood's tricky financial relationship with China, The Great Wall is a fascinating curio. The film's director is Zhang Yimou, the mind behind classic mid-'00s wuxia films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and he finds visual poetry in computer-generated monster battles. Watch the trailer below and try to pick up on what I'm talking about.Īs a movie, The Great Wall is often goofy and occasionally breathtaking it's more swashbuckling and spry than the trailers suggested, and it contains enough inventively staged battle sequences, clever lines, and striking images to make it watchable. Or with - depending on how much credit you want to give Damon. It's not quite up there with Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves accent or Cameron Diaz's attempt at an Irish brogue in Gangs of New York, but it's worth pointing out. Playing a grizzled mercenary named William Garin, Damon lowers his vocal timbre throughout the movie, perhaps as a tribute to Hollywood swashbucklers of the past, reading his lines in a way that oscillates between English warrior, Irish pub-dweller, and very gruff American dude who may or may not be a doomsday prepper. But there's one aspect of the film that hasn't faced as much public scrutiny: Matt Damon's hilarious accent. If you've heard about the $150 million international co-production at all, it's probably because of the criticism the film has faced for perpetuating a white savior narrative seen in countless adventure stories like Avatar, Dances with Wolves, and The Last Samurai.
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It's getting mostly negative reviews and is expected to be a box-office disappointment in the U.S. I don't think the excuses people try to use to justify that 'norm' hold up any more.The Great Wall is a ridiculous movie about Matt Damon joining an army of Chinese soldiers to fight off dragon-like creatures rapidly encroaching on their shit. "So when I see Matt Damon's face staring at me from a poster that says The Great Wall.
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"I'll fork over half my bank account if they ever make a superhero movie starring Constance Wu," Kuhn said. Speaking with the Daily Beast's Jen Yamato Friday, Heroine Complex author Sarah Kuhn said she's had enough of the "positively archaic" notion of whitewashed spectacles. With The Great Wall, the discussion has another worthy talking point: why is Matt Damon the guy saving ancient China from big-ass dragons? From Emma Stone playing an Asian woman in Cameron Crowe's box office bomb Aloha to Scarlett Johansson's petition-inspiring role in Ghost in the Shell, the industry's apparent whitewashing problem doesn't seem to have made very much progress despite decades of potential moments of epiphany. That "ongoing conversation" has received plenty of new talking points in subsequent months.