![]() Zhang stages the battle scenes between the Chinese warriors and the otherworldly trespassers with a balletic sense of pageantry (the cobalt blue-clad female archers bungee jumping from the Wall’s turrets are breathtaking), but the esteemed filmmaker of such masterworks as Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and Hero seems hobbled by the genre-bending narrative. (They appear to be okay with the remaining six deadly sins.) Of course, everything has its Kryptonite, in this case a magnetic ore that can temporarily pacify the beasts’ lethal urges. Having crash-landed on Earth two millennia ago, these nasty aliens, led by a man-hungry queen (literally) rise up every 60 years on an inexplicable mission to punish humanity for its greed. ![]() ![]() The strange invaders in Chinese director Yimou Zhang’s fantasy action film set sometime around the 12th century aren’t your typical Mongolian hordes, but rather (spoiler alert!) monstrous extraterrestrials resembling reptilian hyenas with skin the color of Day-Glo green relish. Or a kernel of historical accuracy, for that matter. A giant barrier constructed for the purpose of fortifying a border to keep out foreigners may be a loaded premise in these xenophobic times, but no worries: The Great Wall is a soggy popcorn movie without the kernel of a political agenda.
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