12/29/17 The Great Wall (Movie)

    I told Wife we needed a little variety, we've been catching up on our recorded shows, but there's only so many Lucifer episodes or Big Bang Theory I can watch before deciding I need other stimuli.  Since we haven't bought movies in a long time, and Boy was not home to get us tickets at Alamo, we looked through our HBO on Demand and found "The Great Wall".  It stars Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal as the European faces, along with Willem Dafoe in a very much Chinese cast, or that is what the actors are trying to represent as the story focuses on the great wall and why it exists.  There is a small group of Europeans venturing to China in hopes of finding black powder, which would give them an advantage in fighting, but just traveling there, they lose all but the two main guys as a Taotie attacks them at their campsite.  It turns out that the Matt Damon is a very skilled warrior (I mean, of course), along with the fact that he carries a piece of magnet which makes the Taotie just a little bit loopy, enough to slow them down so that Damon can kill them.
    As usual, in a Chinese movie, the fighting and armies are choreographed splendidly.  They fly through the air with precision, and the different groups that fight on the wall are all working like one, having full confidence in each other.  The clearly most dangerous job is done by the women who tie themselves to a circular life float and dive down the wall to go spear individual Taotie, lizard like warrior dog things.  All the fighting by the creatures is controlled by the Queen who is very carefully protected by a group of thick shelled larger lizard things.
    At a certain point, the Willem Dafoe character says he has been a prisoner there for 20 plus years and has a plan to get out of there.  The other guy likes the idea of not dying by the talons or fangs of these beasts and also wants to leave with an amount of black powder and go back to their shitty lives of fighting for their food, as he described himself to the beautiful girl general.  She speaks perfect English, taught by the Willem Dafoe character which seems a little convenient, but we accept this for the sake of the movie.  Damon's character feels for the people and wants to stay and help them which causes a rift between him and his friend.  He is left behind and in the meantime the monsters (Taotie) have been digging under the great wall and have quietly gotten past the primary line of defense.
    The fear is that if they get to the main city, there are a billion people and if the monsters start eating them, they will multiply uncontrollably leading them to overwhelm the planet.  Of course, they have been battling them for thousands of years, but only every 60 years or so.  The difference now is that there are Europeans now in the mix.  A Matt Damon goes a long way to saving the planet.  I am being sarcastic, but of course with the new guys they finally have all the pieces in place to battle them and challenge the queen Taotie and take her out.