I was entertained but not really awestruck. For a Yimou Zhang film featuring Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe battling ancient monsters, The Great Wall is neither as exciting nor as.
THE SECRET OF THE GREAT WALL MOVIE MOVIE
Nevertheless, it is not a bad movie and certainly not ambitious enough to deserve any of the vitriol people read into the story without ever watching the movie. The script tries but there simply isn't enough time to do it all and eventually the movie does too little to explore any of the plot elements and characters. The audience never has enough time to get emotionally invested in the characters. It's a hero/East meets West/monster/action/tale of betrayal and redemption/romance/fantasy movie loaded with Chinese symbolism capped by a rather weak, anticlimactic and hurried cookie-cutter ending.
With all that praise then, why does it fall short of being a truly great movie? As my summary indicates it is simply overloaded with too many plot devices. That might be my own idiosyncratic standard but an attractive female lead certainly adds to the "positives". Moreover, Jing Tian has a nice smile and looks really fine in uniform. The acting will not win any Oscars but we see some genuine moments of emotion and bonding and believe it or not but there are one or two scenes with a good suspense arc. The music score could have been better but maybe the composer had a Chinese audience in mind. The costume designs are great, the set designs are very convincing and the CGI is, although not cutting edge, up to modern standards in film-making. First of all, this movie does a lot of things right.