The empty military pornography of The Great Wall

If you want pageantry and spectacle, The Great Wall delivers. Just don't expect it to mean much.

The Great Wall stars Matt Damon.

The main lesson of Zhang Yimou's blockbuster film The Great Wall is that walls — particularly great ones — don't work.

China's most expensive movie cost some $150 million to make, and while it's a very pretty bit of military pornography, the dispiriting moral is that if monsters want in, they'll get in. And oh, what monsters. Picture the eponymous creature from Alien run through the screaming Dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park, only heavy as cows and synced up like bees. The only spectacle more worrying than the endless streams of color-coded soldiers manning the Great Wall — rendered as a pleasingly literal war machine here, complete with gigantic scissors — is the plague of "Taotie" who pop up every 60 years or so to feed their queen human flesh.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.