The great wall movie whitewashing
If you’ve seen his work such as “Hero” and “House of the Flying Daggers,” you know Yimou Zhang is a brilliant visual stylist. Uh huh.Ģ) The director of this film is Chinese. But having one of those heroes fighting the dragons look like Matt Damon-well, that’s just outrageously unrealistic.
So if I’m understanding this right, we’re cool with suspending belief to watch Chinese warriors from hundreds of years ago fight dragons. This is not a somber meditation on Chinese history, but an action-fantasy flick that posits the Chinese built the great wall of China to keep from being attacked by dragons.
4 Reasons This Is Obviously Stupidġ) This is a film about dragons. So here’s a quick accounting of the ways this critique is brain-damaged. However, the idiocy of poring over every movie to ensure it meets whatever sexual or ethnographic standards are en vogue at the moment is something I’m confident the vast majority of the movie-going public is pretty sick of. He has also miraculously made a lot of money asking the question, “What if we turned the James Bond franchise into joyless, left-wing agitprop?” Since Damon now finds himself victimized by the identity politics he otherwise seems to champion, the temptation here is to say, “How do you like them apples?” As a result, Damon is being accused of “‘whitewashing’ Chinese history.”ĭamon isn’t just a regular Hollywood liberal he’s such a diehard lefty he thinks Howard Zinn is an important, let alone honest, historian (see here, here, and here). Until then, at least this makes a visit to medieval China look awesome.Matt Damon now finds himself at the center of the latest politically correct controversy because the actor is starring in “The Great Wall.” You can watch the trailer here. Still, it would have been nice for this film to pull a Psycho and kill off the big Hollywood star in the first 20 minutes, drawing in those audiences with the familiar American face and then smacking them with a truly Chinese adventure story. Yet it's not fair to blame Zhang for that culture, nor to pillory this relatively unoffensive film for all the accumulated ills of Hollywood if you’re going to boycott a film for under-representing Asian characters it’s probably not sensible to start with the one made in China by a Chinese director. That's the culture where, if Zhang Yimou wants his film to play big internationally, he has to cast someone bigger than Andy Lau as Strategist Wang, bigger than Jing – or at least more Western. It's a culture where Jon Cho somehow doesn't star in everything ( ) and where Steven Yuen ( The Walking Dead's Glenn) is somehow to be found auditioning for small roles instead of walking into big ones. It looks worse amid a Hollywood culture of whitewashing Asian characters in particular, something that's caused controversy for Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and Emma Stone just in the last few years. It's all very well to have William increasingly impressed by the example of the Nameless Order, but shouldn't they be at the centre of their own story? The problem becomes murkier when you consider how much more screentime and focus the Europeans are given. So this is not strictly whitewashing: white actors play white characters, and Chinese actors get far more roles. The Chinese are portrayed as culturally, militarily and strategically far in advance of the interlopers, who have, remember, just travelled halfway around the world to steal their technology.
To hear director Zhang talk about it, the European characters are, sure, a necessary ingredient to make a film on this scale and sell it worldwide, but also a narratively convenient vehicle for exposition on a grand scale.