The Great Wall (2017)

Phil - This is not the monster hunter movie I wanted but it's the monster hunter movie I got. On paper the recipe of this movie has all the key ingredients I love. Man against monster, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" style armies and generals, seigecraft and a dash of fantasy. Unfortunately they also added copious amounts of Matt Damon, standard dumbness, and poor CG design. The resulting movie is minor, another lump of failed potential.

 In contrast to the crap CG, the costume and set design was pretty amazing. This adds further fuel to my contention that CG departments are often incompetent, rogue entities operating outside the artistic influence of the people making the real movie. Obviously there is some coordination going on but I believe that factors such as the high cost and the inability to see the final result during filming lead to a lack of refinement in design and execution. It is a blight on the land, CG has hit a trash plateau and it's hurting a lot of big movies.

 Anyway, the dialogue was pretty silly, but it wasn't without its charms. I guggled at the surprise appearance of Willem Dafoe literally poking his head around a corner early on in the movie. And I don't dislike Matt Damon but he wasn't really needed here. Jing Tian could have easily carried this movie on her own but I have a feeling it wouldn't have reached my rural theater if that were the case and that sucks.

 Really what bothered me most was the lack of ambition, the lack of largeness. Monster Hunter (the game) is a thing that has been out in the world for a while now, long enough to have left a dent in the collective subconscious. It's a game that takes the classic Knight vs. Dragon trope to the extreme edges of plausibility. The scale and stakes of this game are so, for lack of a better word, epic that they begin to take on a primal theme: a few scrappy humans can overcome astronomical obstacles through sheer grit and determination. While there is a HINT of that in this movie, it never really gets there. It instead opts for battles in a style that seems to say, "I saw the battles in Lord of the Rings and decided to do that, except half as intense and twice as dumb." That's mean but this movie really disappointed me, it's budget was 150 million, all the LotR's budgets were under 100 million, there really was no excuse to be almost cool but actually kinda lame. 6/10