By Louis Chan
AsAmNews National Correspondent
You don’t have to be a student of history to know the Great Wall was built by the Chinese to keep out foreigners.
That 3800 mile wall didn’t stop Hollywood from plopping Matt Damon in the center of China in the 10th century to save the country from evil monsters.
The movie from Universal Pictures and China’s Le Vision Pictures and China Film Group Corporation is written by American writers.
It’s directed by China’s Zhang Yimou who told Entertainment Weekly the movie is from an American perspective with elements of Chinese identity.
Apparently an American perspective requires the writer to feature a White savior to save an entire country of helpless Chinese, because we know a country with millions of people wouldn’t have a savior of its own.
It’s Tom Cruz in The Last Samurai all over again. Sooner or later, Hollywood will realize the world’s young movie goers don’t need a White central character to want to go to an epic film with elaborate special effects and a gorgeous natural backdrop.
Millennials are more open to diversity and accepting of other cultures than any other generation before them. It’s time for Hollywood to show some guts and cash in on this new generation and the new America.
“I think for a long time that did feel like the norm and as a viewer, I accepted it as one—that big American studio movies starred White people, that you can’t make money on a movie without White stars, and so on and so forth,” said Sara Kuhn of the graphic novel Heroine Complex to The Daily Beast. “But now that idea feels positively archaic. We’ve seen big, whitewashed spectacles that have totally tanked at the box office. We’ve seen the overwhelming excitement that flares up every time a big, geeky movie gives us a POC hero—like Black Panther in Civil War.”
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The Great Wall is set to be released in February. I can wait.
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