Matt Damon appeared as a guest star on the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast and acknowledged that “The Great Wall” was a terrible movie.
Damon’s thoughts: The award-winning actor told Maron that the film “doesn’t cohere” and “doesn’t work as a movie,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
- Damon also stated that director Zhang Yimou was pressured by Hollywood producers to change the film and sacrifice his original ideas.
- In addition to the movie’s critics, Damon’s daughter also thinks it’s terrible. She calls the movie “The Wall” and when Damon attempts to correct her, she responds by saying that “there’s nothing great about that movie.”
- “I came to consider that the definition of a professional actor, knowing you’re in a turkey and going: ‘OK, I’ve got four more months. It’s the up-at-dawn siege on Hamburger Hill. I am definitely going to die here, but I’m doing it.’ That’s as sh*tty as you can feel creatively, I think. I hope to never have that feeling again,” said Damon.
- The actor also addressed the film’s accusations of whitewashing and stated that he “saw the movie as the exact same plot as ‘Lawrence of Arabia'” where an “outsider comes into a new culture, finds value in the culture, brings some skill from the outside that aids them in their fight against whatever and they’re all changed forever.”
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About the movie: “The Great Wall” is about European mercenaries who discover a secret army that defends the Great Wall of China against monsters in ancient times.
- The movie came out in 2016 and was rated 35% by critics with a 42% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.9 stars out of 10 on IMDb.
- While several critics commended Zhang for the visually stunning scenes, many found the storyline to be bland.
- Hollywood Reporter’s Clarence Tsui wrote that it was “easily the least interesting and involving blockbuster of the respective careers of both its director and star.”
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