Matt Damon And Pedro Pascal's Controversial Monster Movie Is Finding New Fans On Prime Video

Back in 2016, a relatively unheralded monster movie starring Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon (who we've now spent more than $900 billion trying to save) launched amid a flurry of controversy. Called "The Great Wall", the film is set on and around the Great Wall of China in a fictionalized 11th century where rampaging monsters threaten the world every sixty years. The controversy centered primarily on the casting of Damon in a role that many believed should've gone to a Chinese actor given the setting and historical context. The director responded, claiming that the role wasn't conceived with a Chinese actor in mind and that, of the five major heroes in the film, four of them are Chinese.

That said, I'd hardly be surprised if you've never heard of "The Great Wall". While it did reasonably well at the box office, taking in $334,486,852 worldwide against an estimated budget of $150 million, most of that was international. Domestically it earned a smidge over $45 million, and was heavily panned critically, racking up a 35% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 42 on Metacritic.

However, the film has recently found new life. As of April 30, "The Great Wall" is sitting at number 7 on the top 10 Amazon Prime films in the United States, according to Flixpatrol.com. The film popped up on April 21st and has been sliding around the bottom few slots since. 

On the surface, "The Great Wall" is something of an interesting hybrid. It mixes an alien monster story with a compelling historical setting, the reign of Emperor Renzong in China around the turn of the first millennium. Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal play a couple of European mercenaries (Irish and Spanish, respectively) who have come to China in pursuit of gunpowder. Their expedition gets more than they bargain for when they encounter a monster that murders all of their compatriots, and Pascal and Damon are subsequently taken captive by a mysterious secret society tasked with combating this monstrous threat.

It turns out the monsters are cosmic in origin, having arrived on Earth by way of meteorite. They've been assaulting the Great Wall like clockwork every 60 years, with only the Nameless Order standing between them and the rest of human civilization. One interesting wrinkle is that the monsters in the film are called the Tao Tie, based on a creature from real-world Chinese myth called the taotie.

What follows is a rambling tale of greed, betrayal, and sacrifice. I won't spoil the ending, but it's pretty well telegraphed in the opening scenes, and everything resolves more or less exactly as you'd expect for a formulaic Hollywood blockbuster.

While it's impossible to say precisely what's responsible for the sudden surge in interest in "The Great Wall", there are a couple of factors that could be contributing. The most obvious is the popularity of its leads, who are both riding waves of success. Alongside the excellent sci-fi animated film now streaming on Peacock, "The Wild Robot", Pascal was widely lauded for his role as Mr. Fantastic in Marvel's "The Fantastic Four: First Steps", a role he'll reprise later this year in the highly anticipated "Avengers: Doomsday."

Damon, meanwhile, is set to star in another fictionalized historical epic later this year, Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey". Based on Homer's legendary epic, like "The Great Wall," it also features Damon as a European battling mythological monsters. Perhaps the "Odyssey" hype is driving viewers to scour the streamers for other epic monster-battling flicks.

While it's unlikely to be a driver for the return of "The Great Wall" to the cultural zeitgeist, there is another fun coincidence of timing involving Pascal. He's set to reunite with a writer of "The Great Wall", Tony Gilroy, for "Behemoth!" alongside Olivia Wilde and Will Arnett. Details about the project are scant, but Gilroy, who's set to write and direct, has revealed it's about a cellist and will be scored by many different composers.