Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is prompting movie fans revisiting just about every corner of Matt Damon’s career. Naturally, that means returning to the Bourne films, Contagion, The Martian, Interstellar, and The Departed. While they’re all great movies that challenge the actor in many fascinating ways, they don’t quite match the same mythical feel promised by The Odyssey.
But one Damon performance, often the same one omitted when talking of his best work, is the closest thing he’s done to a mythical fantasy adventure, and it even has both Pedro Pascal and Willem Dafoe co-starring with him. It’s by no means a secret masterpiece, but The Great Wall serves as a reminder that blockbuster filmmaking once made more room for singular visions, even when they didn’t always succeed. Better still, it’s free to watch on Tubi.
When Zhang Yimou’s fantasy epic premiered in 2016, audiences largely fixated on everything surrounding it rather than the movie itself. As Hollywood’s first major U.S.-China co-production, the $150 million blockbuster sparked debates over its casting and whether such an ambitious collaboration could succeed. Lost in that conversation was a gleefully pulpy story about a pair of European mercenaries who arrive at the Great Wall expecting riches, only to find China’s elite defenders locked in a centuries-old war against monstrous alien creatures called Taotie. It sounds wild in theory, but in Zhang’s hands, that premise becomes a visually extravagant fantasy spectacle unlike any other.
Damon’s Garin, the driving force of the film, isn’t all that far removed from the kind of legendary hero he eventually plays in The Odyssey. He’s a wandering mercenary motivated by survival and profit, dropped into a conflict so much larger than himself that his priorities gradually change. It’s an archetype as old as myth, and Damon plays it with the same grounded confidence that’s made him such a reliable leading man for decades. He’s also surprisingly game for the movie’s more ridiculous action beats, effortlessly selling impossible bow shots and gravity-defying feats that would feel at home in one of Zhang’s wuxia classics.
Watching The Great Wall today also offers a fun reminder of just how different Pedro Pascal’s career looked a decade ago. Before becoming one of Hollywood’s most in-demand leading men through roles in Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, Pascal appeared in The Great Wall simply as Matt Damon’s charming partner in crime. Their chemistry is effortless. As fellow mercenaries Garin and Pero Tovar, the pair spend much of the film trading dry banter before they’re swept into Zhang’s increasingly fantastical world.
Long before Zhang was directing English-language blockbusters, he had already established himself as one of cinema’s great visual stylists with films like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Raise the Red Lantern. His style has always been rooted in the use of extreme color, movement, and composition, all working together to tell a cohesive story. The Great Wall gives him a much larger canvas to work with. While it arrived during the peak of Game of Thrones fever, Zhang transforms what could have been another grim fantasy blockbuster into something far more operatic.
Rather than treating action as chaos, Zhang approaches it almost like theater. The Nameless Order, the secretive military organization tasked with defending humanity against the Taotie, performs its attacks with acrobatic grace instead of striking with cold-hearted ferocity. Soldiers move in synchronized formations, brightly colored battalions flow across the Wall like brushstrokes on a painting, and sweeping wide shots emphasize geometry over frantic editing. Even the film’s most over-the-top battles remain easy to follow because Zhang understands exactly where your eye should be. At a time when so many modern blockbusters rely on quick cuts and gray digital sludge, The Great Wall feels refreshingly deliberate.
It’s also aged better than many of its contemporaries. One of its defining images sees the all-female Crane Corps diving headfirst off the Wall on enormous blue bungee tethers, spears pointed toward a sea of monsters below. It’s an absurd concept on paper, but Zhang stages it with such precision and conviction that it becomes genuinely exhilarating. Rather than winking at the audience, he commits completely to the fantasy, trusting that striking compositions and carefully choreographed action are enough to sell even the movie’s wildest ideas.
Time has been kind to The Great Wall. What’s left after nearly a decade isn’t the discourse or the box office disappointment, but a wildly entertaining fantasy epic directed with absolute conviction. Before Damon sets sail in The Odyssey, it’s worth revisiting the fantasy adventure that proved he was more than capable of carrying an entire myth on his shoulders.
