By Susan JAMES

Somewhere in the smoky backrooms of studio politics, producers from the U.S.-China joint venture production company Legendary East and from Le Vision Pictures, one of the largest production companies in China, met to come up with a concept for a blockbuster motion picture. One bright sprig had a brilliant idea.

“What if Mulan met Marco Polo and they joined forces against the orcs of Mordor?”

“Set that on the Great Wall and you’ve got a deal,” cried an excited voice from across the room.

“Make it so,” said the Powers That Be and the CGI extravaganza called “The Great Wall” was born.

Matt Damon, the featured star of “The Great Wall,” is a fascinating actor. He can be charismatic and compelling, making the adventure of being shipwrecked on Mars endlessly fascinating. Or he can walk through a film with his gaze firmly fixed on his paycheck as he did in the last outing of Jason Bourne. Zhang Yimou is a fascinating director with some experience of cross-cultural filmmaking like the 2011 Christian Bale drama, “The Flowers of War.” But neither seems to be at his best in this epic.

Big, big, big – just not great – the story is a variation on the theme of civilization holding out against the forces of darkness. It features lots and lots of CGI shots of the mysterious Wall sometime around the era of Marco Polo.  But the Wall itself, which should be a star in the film, never amounts to much more than a pile of stone with a few towers on top. For all its looming presence in Chinese history this barrier could just as well be Hadrian’s Wall in northern England manned by the Roman army or the Saksayhuaman Wall in southern Peru featuring a bunch of angry Incas. The only reason we know it’s China is because of the striking number of attractive Chinese actors doing close-ups while speaking in subtitles.

The movie opens with a group of mounted European mercenaries fleeing Central Asian bandits somewhere in the deserts of northwest China.  Englishman William (Damon, accent upon request) and Spanish Tovar (Pedro Pascal, authentic accent) survive the bandits but run into a supernatural monster deep in the desert night. William manages to slay the beast and takes a cut-off talon as a trophy. With the bandits still in pursuit, William and Tovar find themselves suddenly pinned against the Great Wall. They’re taken prisoner by the Chinese army that has massed at the Wall to wait for an expected attack.  Every 60 years an army of monsters, which resemble a cross between the orcs of Mordor and the velociraptors of “Jurassic Park,” emerge to ravage and devour.

William and Tovar have journeyed to China to steal the legendary Chinese gunpowder. But now William is faced with the questing hero’s moral dilemma. Does he stay and fight the good fight against ultimate evil or grab the powder and run? Most moviegoers can figure that one out. Helping him make the right choice are Mulan (Tian Jing), known here as Commander Lin, and Gandalf, known here as Strategist Wang, an effective Andy Lau. An entire roster of commanders and cohorts are on call and, being a Chinese film, several sympathetic characters are set up so that we may mourn their demise.

If slavering monsters scaling mighty monuments are just your thing, then this film is for you.

See you at the movies!

  susan james