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  • Featured Movies
    • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    • 1941 (Spielberg) >
      • 1941: Part 2
    • Affair of the Necklace
    • Alice's Restaurant: best of the American counterculture movies?
    • Army of Crime
    • Army of Shadows
    • The Artist >
      • 'The Artist':2
    • Anthropoid: the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 1942: Four Very Different Movies >
      • Hangmen Also Die: Hollywood meets emigres from Nazi Germany
    • Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    • Battle of the Rails ( La bataille du rail)
    • Belle (2014)
    • Bhowani Junction
    • Blackboard Jungle >
      • Blackboard Jungle Pt.2
    • Carry On Up the Khyber
    • Charlie Wilson's War
    • The City Across the River
    • The Counterculture : best movies about the American counterculture era
    • Custer - two contrasting movie portrayals: "They Died With Their Boots On" and "Little Big Man" >
      • They Died With Their Boots On
      • Stalin and the Movies >
        • Stalin, Disney, Eisenstein, & Ivan the Terrible
      • Death of Stalin
      • Little Big Man (1970)
    • Dark Knight Rises >
      • Dark Knight Rises Pt.2
    • The Deceivers
    • Diplomacy / Diplomatie (2014) movie
    • Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan's epic movie
    • El Cid
    • The Enigma Machine : four movies about the Enigma machine
    • Generation War >
      • Generation War: Jazz and the Swing Kids
      • Generation War: German women and the war
    • The Great Gatsby On the Big Screen
    • Gunga Din
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      • Martha Gellhorn >
        • Women war correspondents
    • Hyde Park on Hudson
    • The Imitation Game (2014) >
      • The Imitation Game Part 2: the truth about Turing and the Bletchley 'Bombe'. >
        • The Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley and the Colossus >
          • Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley Park and the Soviet spy
    • The Inner Circle (1991)
    • Is Paris Burning? >
      • Is Paris Burning? General von Choltitz
    • KIng of the Khyber Rifles
    • Kim
    • Léon Morin, Priest
    • Les Miserables (2012) >
      • Les Miserables in Movies: Fantine the grisette >
        • Les Miserables 3: guide to some historical references
    • "Les Misérables": Claude Lelouch updates a classic
    • Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
    • The Long Duel
    • Looking at Lincoln - Spielberg's "Lincoln" & its predecessors and influences >
      • Spielberg's Lincoln
      • Abraham Lincoln: D.W. Griffith's version
      • Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
      • Abe Lincoln in Illinois
    • Mandingo (1975) Dir: Richard Fleischer
    • The Man Who Would Be King
    • Marie Antoinette (2006)
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      • Marie Antoinette (1938) Pt.2
    • Mayerling
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      • Midnight in Paris:2 >
        • Midnight in Paris:3
    • The Monuments Men (2014) Dir: George Clooney
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    • La Nuit de Varennes - a post-modern take on a key episode in the French Revolution
    • Le Pere Tranquille (The Quiet Father) 1946
    • Peterloo: MIke Leigh's New Movie >
      • Peterloo2
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      • Pompeii (2014) Paul W.S. Anderson director
    • Rebel Without a Cause
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    • Zabriskie Point
  • Places
    • Settings: the North West Frontier
    • Movies Set in the North-West Frontier >
      • Thuggees
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      • Pt2:The Girl Can't Help It
  • Free State of Jones
  • Great Wall (2017)
  • Rogue One & World War 2
  • Hollywood and anti-Americanism in a small country: Amercan movies & their critics in New Zealand 1916 - 1956
    • New Zealanders' Love of Movies 1900s-1956
    • Campaign against Hollywood movies in New Zealand
    • Campaign against HollywoodPt 2
  • Hollywood versus Pinewood Pt2
  • New Zealanders and Movies: the Enigmatic Gordon Mirams: film critic, film censor and public intellectual
  • Aryan Papers: Stanley Kubrick's Proposed Movie

The Great Wall (2017)

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 However, the film actually shows 0This  $135 million (and counting) movie - China's most expensive - is made by the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou. In order to widen its appeal to western audiences, the movie puts Matt Damon in  a leading role. His casting has been criticised as yet another example of  the "western hero to the rescue to  save the foreigners from disaster" syndrome. However, the film actually shows Damon and his foreign mercenary friend as in awe of  Chinese  scientific knowledge and military and organisational skills. Described as an epic science-fantasy monster-adventure film, it obviously makes little claim to historical authenticity. In fact, the 'great wall' never was one single wall; it's a series of walls built at different times  by the orders of different rulers in different areas for different purposes. It's not 5500 miles long, nor can it be seen from the moon. And it wasn't built to keep horrible monsters out, which is the movie's cheerfully implausible selling-point.
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Spectacle

Director Zhang Yimou is a master of HOuse of Flying Daggers, Hero, Red Sorghum, director of opening and closimg Olympic Games ceremonies. His best folms combine grand spectacle with magnificent images,while at the sane time examining the personal lives of some characters. 
His magnificent action scenes have inspired many imitators: 2016's Game of Thrones "Battle of the Bastards" famous award-winning  battle scenes are lifted from Zhang's 2006 movie Curse of the Golden Flower

More, please
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Flamboyant action

Zhang has provided some of the best action set pieces of the last couple of decades e.g. House of Fling Daggers.They combine magnificent scenery, bursts of slow motion, and superbly edited and choreographed combat, They are enhanced by magnificent photography. both interiorand exterior.
The famous 'battle of the bastards' sequence in the 2016 season of "Game of Thrones" owes a great deal to the climax of Zhang's 2006 movie "Curse of the Golden Flower"
More, please
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The Great Wall itself 

The movie's plot involves mysterious and terrifying beasts (dragons?) attacking the wall and its defenders in an attempt to destroy the inhabitants of China it is designed to protect. 
But in fact, the actual Great Wall was always an incomplete work in progress, and most historians doubt that key sections of it were actually capable of repellingt invaders, even those in human form rather than enormous flying monsters.
More, please


Man-eating monsters!

The monsters in this movie are the Taotie, dragon-like flesh-eating monsters who have a habit every 60 years of breaking through the Great Wall in order to feast on humans. 
Taotie were in fact regularly featured in  Chinese mythology, and were a popular subject depicted on bronze vessels from the Zhang and Zhou dynasties. Images of Taotie may date even further back in time, to designs on Neolithic jade pieces.The movie depicts the swarming mosters as being led by a "queen" talkie, much along the lines of the creature from Aliens.

The movie's great wall isn't really the great wall of China

As portrayed in the movie, the great wall of China is a long, high,  continuous massively solid structure, apparently built of solid rock and stone,  designed to keep flesh-eating flying monsters out. Of course, the actual wall was not built to repel monsters.  True, in some areas it was intemded to keep human invaders at bay. But it had other purposes as well. It was a marker of frontiers and a warning for intruders. But it was never continuous, and always had gaps. Its sections were built over several centuries.
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