Zhang Yimou

The Great Wall has garnered controversy for its white savior narrative that finds Matt Damon, a white dude, saving an ancient Chinese dynasty from mythical monsters. But the most offensive thing about The Great Wall isn’t even the racial dynamic, or Damon’s painfully bad Irish/Scottish accent; it’s that Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed Chinese filmmaker behind Hero and House of Flying Daggers, has managed to make a movie this ugly.

From the time that the first images of Zhang Yimou’s upcoming historical epic The Great Wall came to light, the thorny matter of identity politics has hounded the film. In the period piece, confirmed white man Matt Damon portrays a heroic warrior that protects the Middle Kingdom’s greatest architectural and strategic achievement from an encroaching menace, and many frustrated online commentators have questioned the place of a non-Asian actor in a wholly Asian film. The term “whitewashing” cropped up all over, referring to the continued practice in the film industry of casting Caucasian actors in roles that could (or should) have otherwise gone to non-white performers. With a problematic pall still cast over the production and the February 17 release fast approaching, Damon spoke out on the issue in a new interview with the Associated Press, via The Hollywood Reporter, and attempted to assuage some of the public’s misgivings.

When the first teaser trailer for The Great Wall debuted this summer, much of the internet responded in a collective thinking face emoji, wondering, why is a white dude the hero of an action movie set in China?