Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

RNMorton The action never stops as Damon and friend, expert marksmen, visit China in the midst of an alien creature invasion. They have built the Great Wall against these creatures and they need it all for this most recent attack. Damon pitches in while wondering how he can get his hands on the legendary Chinese explosives. The action never lets up, and Jing and Damon make a very fascinating and attractive team. The end of this goes a little over the top, that's the only disappoint for me in an otherwise fine movie.

overdarklord I normally think you should judge a movie not by what you wanted to see, or what you expected but by what you actually got, but god damn we are speaking of a movie here made by none other than Zhang Yimou, not only one of the best directors of china but maybe even the whole world. This man made more masterpieces in my opinion than any other director I can think of, so it's natural that I expected some quality. Surely he made his bad movies, every director did, but Great Wall is on a whole other level of bad.I think most of Yimous movies share 3 traits that he uses very well in his better movies. I want to go over those 3 and see how he uses them in his newest movie, "the great wall".So firstly, many of his movies have incredible visuals. They have at least some shots that are breathtaking. He likes to but famous natural sights in his movies but he also knows how to handle lighting and architecture. The best examples I can name is his works with colors and leafs in "Hero", or the incredible atmosphere he created with the red lantern in the movie surprisingly called "Raise the red lantern", 2 movies which are nothing other than masterpieces and you really need to watch them if you haven't already. Now in "the great wall" he takes the famous rainbow mountains of Zhangye Danxia as his visual landmark like he previously did in his movie "A Woman, a gun and a noodle shop" but more than that he puts a CGi version of the Great Wall of China over it. The wall looks obviously computer animated (so it wasn't good animation) and the whole scene looks rather ridicoulus if you ask me. When you watch this movie you will mostly see CG images and crappy ones for that, ones that you can immediately spot and which just make the shot seem ugly.A second trait I think his movies share is that they all have a unique story to tell. He seems to not like to repeat himself because all his movie feel very different from one another and frankly even from other Chinese movies in general, in terms of storytelling. If he picks them up or comes up with them on his own, most of his stories, diverse in tones as they are, are always unique and interesting, full of characters with personality and charm. What happened in this movie? I didn't care about any of these characters and the story is just a "monster beat them up" for no reason. Sure it is different from other Yimou movies, but this movie feels like you have seen it a thousand times before. He doesn't go into any depth or any motivation of any of the character. All of the characteristics that we do have of the characters merely function as plot device; everything seems so forced and shallow.Lastly Yimou likes to put in drama in his movie, and perfectly crafted one for that. In other movies of him you can see that by adding great acting and engaging music you can even make death scenes of characters you didn't really care about sad. Best examples would be "to Live" and "Riding alone for thousands of miles". 2 very stunning and thought provoking movies and very recommendable. But neither has "the great wall" great acting nor engaging music. The only scene which became remotely engaging was when one of the soldiers threw away a bloody piece of equipment of a fallen comrade onto a pile of even more of these bloody pieces of equipment. It was basically the only good shot in the entire movie because it worked as a reminder of the deaths this fighting costed by just a mere 1 second shot, creating emotions and a bigger understanding of the sacrifices that are made. I really needed more of this in the movie.The movie also plays around the idea of friendship and trust among soldiers. The Chinese soldiers claim to be a big family and this idea plays a big role especially in the identity crisis of the main character. He comes to them in a selfish mentality and through this experience changes. The thing is, I didn't buy it. We never see trust and friendship among them, they didn't even mourn over the hundreds of their "family members" they lost. On the other hand, the main character shows a way bigger bond with his companion he arrives at this wall than any of the Chinese soldiers.A fun fact and also a bit of a spoiler is that all of Zhang Yimous other movies have a certain kind of ending, I won't say what, but if you have seen a bunch of his movies you should know what I am talking about. Strangely enough, this movie has a complete opposite sort of ending and I can't figure out why. Maybe it was because he kind of tried to cater this movie to American audience, or he wanted to try something different, but I think his old style fits his movies way more.

alaskabarb808-116-604232 Other user reviewers either loved or hated this movie, with many in between. Count me in the latter. Rather than a real review, I'm just going to share some thoughts about it. 'Hero' was one of my favorite movies ever; I loved the Chinese and Ukrainian forest scenes in 'House of Flying Daggers;' 'Curse of the Golden Flower' was fairly entertaining, though it was hard to square the fluorescent illuminated hot pink and neon-colored plastic columns with a palace in 928 A.D. So, liking the director's other movies and the actors, I wanted to enjoy it .... but then came the flood of CGI monsters. (Maybe it's a girl thing?) but -just like in LOTR, the Twin Towers, my eyes glazed over a minute into the sight of 200,000 identically rendered grey, ugly monster animal thingies swarming the set. I cease to care. Wake me when 90% of them are dead, and there's a good sword fight, or some dialog. That occurred about the time Matt Damon chose to free Oberon instead of grabbing the black powder, but not before some of those ghastly-colored plastic interiors from COTGF made an appearance. It might be one of those movies that grows on a person over time, during the rounds of late-night cableTV. That's the recommendation- wait until you can watch it for free, so you won't resent it taking two hours from your life.

Roddypii This movie had everything to be one of the best "war" movies... but it's fantasy side put everything down. It's beautiful, really beautiful to see. The armies are fantastic. Jing Tian is great on her role. All the battles are really well done but the plot is quite weak and leaves you thinking why they did that. The ending could have been better.. they tried to do something that wasn't the obvious and they failed for me. But overall, it's a really nice movie to see.