Until then, at least this makes a visit to medieval China look awesome.O n the hunt for precious “black powder”, rogue mercenaries William Garin (a grizzled-looking Matt Damon) and Pero Tovar ( Game of Thrones’s Pedro Pascal) are captured by The Nameless Order, an ancient military operation occupying the Great Wall of China.
Still, it would have been nice for this film to pull a Psycho and kill off the big Hollywood star in the first 20 minutes, drawing in those audiences with the familiar American face and then smacking them with a truly Chinese adventure story. Yet it's not fair to blame Zhang for that culture, nor to pillory this relatively unoffensive film for all the accumulated ills of Hollywood if you’re going to boycott a film for under-representing Asian characters it’s probably not sensible to start with the one made in China by a Chinese director. That's the culture where, if Zhang Yimou wants his film to play big internationally, he has to cast someone bigger than Andy Lau as Strategist Wang, bigger than Jing – or at least more Western. It's a culture where Jon Cho somehow doesn't star in everything ( ) and where Steven Yuen ( The Walking Dead's Glenn) is somehow to be found auditioning for small roles instead of walking into big ones. It looks worse amid a Hollywood culture of whitewashing Asian characters in particular, something that's caused controversy for Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and Emma Stone just in the last few years. It's all very well to have William increasingly impressed by the example of the Nameless Order, but shouldn't they be at the centre of their own story? The problem becomes murkier when you consider how much more screentime and focus the Europeans are given. So this is not strictly whitewashing: white actors play white characters, and Chinese actors get far more roles. The Chinese are portrayed as culturally, militarily and strategically far in advance of the interlopers, who have, remember, just travelled halfway around the world to steal their technology.
To hear director Zhang talk about it, the European characters are, sure, a necessary ingredient to make a film on this scale and sell it worldwide, but also a narratively convenient vehicle for exposition on a grand scale.
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