If William had found a KitKat in his bag we would have no doubt discovered the monsters happen to have a kryptonite-like aversion to chocolatey wafer. Choose your favorite alexander the great paintings from 487 available designs. The length of the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) is 8,851.8 kilometers (5,500.3 miles), and there is about 526 kilometers (327 miles) lying in Beijing. Every major aspect of their behaviour - such as their main vulnerability and communication methods - comes across as shoehorned in, designed to provide a sledgehammer-blatant path for the heroes to follow to overcome them. The total length of the Great Wall of China built in different dynasties is 21,196.18 kilometers (13,170.70 miles), announced by Chinas State Administration of Cultural Relics in 2012. The vicious Tao Teis aren’t much more memorable, despite being impressively rendered and bred from the usual Lord Of The Rings/Games Workshop monster farm - the only significant design twists being Chinese-style designs on their foreheads and having eyes on their shoulders. A conversation about his past comes across as a tacked-on attempt to make him seem dark and set up his potential redemption but really, he’s not whitewashing he’s just grey-dull. William is not presented as a white knight, rather a mercenary caught in the chaos.
These are more cause for complaint than the “whitewashing” Damon’s casting supposedly represents. Instead, Chinese cultural clichés abound, from speeches about working together to help the greater cause to Olympic-level gymnastics. When a mercenary warrior (Matt Damon) is imprisoned within the Great Wall, he discovers the mystery behind one of the greatest wonders of the world. The film was trailed as a cultural mash-up but, being set and filmed in China, the casting of Damon, Pedro Pascal and Willem Dafoe (whose character, Ballard, seems there purely to explain how Commander Lin learned English) is the only element representing the West. In ancient China, a group of European mercenaries encounters a secret army that maintains and defends the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures. Via a witheringly lazy plot device - a guard has lost the key to a cell - they end up getting caught up in the combat. William and his fellow fighter-for-hire Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are poking around the Chinese border in search of valuable “black powder” when they run into an army deployed on the Great Wall to defend China from monsters. Matt Damon plays William, a mercenary soldier whose accent suggests he’s from Ireland, or has at least spent a lot of time swigging Guinness in Irish bars. It’s also the most epic project fêted Chinese director Zhang Yimou has taken on since he directed the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, as well as his first English-language film. It is the biggest-ever China-Hollywood co-production, the most expensive film shot entirely in China, and arrives at a time when the global industry is increasingly facing towards the East. 1. With a total length of 21,196.18 km ( 13,170.70 miles ), equal to half the length of the Equator, the Great Wall of China is the longest feat of human engineering.Ģ. In the main today’s wall comprises relics from the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644), measuring 8,851.8 km ( 5,500 miles ).ģ. The average height of the walls is 6 to 7 meters (20 to 23 feet), and the highest is 14 meters (46 feet ).Ĥ. The altitudes of the walls vary – the highest point is the Huanglouyuan in the northwest suburb of Beijing, with an elevation of 1,439.3 meters ( 4,722 feet ), while the lowest point is at Laolongtou in Hebei, just above the sea level.ĥ. The average width is 6.5 meters (21.3 feet).Ħ. The Great Wall is about 2,700 years old.ħ. More than 1,000, 000 laborers were recruited for the construction of this huge project.Ĩ. Location: It spans across 15 regions in north China: Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, and Xinjiang.ġ0. As a must-see in China, it attracts 50 million visitors every year, and had been visited by more than 460 state heads and VIPs from around the world.As is perhaps fitting for a film based onĪ 13,000-mile-long stone structure, The Great Wall bears a huge weight of expectation.