If you’re in my line of work, watching a trailer for a movie like The Great Wall sets off alarm bells in your head. Uh-oh, the PC police are coming.
A f—king white male Matt Damon is starring in a Chinese movie, and people are going to be triggered. The whitewashing, white savior tropes and white privilege are just too much for the fragile culture critics of 2016.
And it didn’t take long for a slew of articles to come out, accusing the movie of just that. The Daily Beast, BBC and Metro were quick to the punch, castigating the movie for whitewashing Chinese history.
But when you look at the actual movie, Matt Damon’s casting has nothing to do with race and everything to do with sucking as much money out of the American and Chinese markets as physically possible. Everything about the film is designed to straddle both markets to produce a massive payout.
The Great Wall is the most expensive film in Chinese cinematic history and directed by an acclaimed Chinese director. There aren’t too many Chinese movie stars that sell tickets in the States, although that’s not the case when it comes to American movie stars in China. Hollywood shamefully does not field a single Chinese American actor that would count as a huge movie star.
So in order to get traction in America, the screenwriters needed to write in some white people. Then you have the plot, where a bunch of Western warriors come to China in search of gun powder just as mythical creatures are attacking the wall.
So should we really blame Hollywood for writing a dumb script to shoehorn an American lead into a Chinese history movie as a way to rake in a bunch of money? Probably not. The more pressing problem comes from the fact that Hollywood lacks Asian-American leads that could be frontmen for these expensive blockbusters.
And is it really “whitewashing” if you put a white guy into a story that’s made up? Will it somehow discount the monumental historical achievement by the Chinese, the Great Wall, if dopey Matt Damon shows up and fights dragons on it? Again, probably not.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be hard on this dumb movie with its dumb plot and shameless strategy to make millions. Just do it for the right reasons.
Follow me on Twitter @William__Hicks.
