Recent examples include Disney considering casting a white actor in the role of Mulan and the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi in the live-action adaption Ghost in the Shell, despite that the character should logically be Japanese seeing as the original is set in Japan.Īs the film depicts China’s Great Wall as a bulwark against supernatural monsters, in the film’s trailers, Matt Damon seemed to play a character who was part of the Chinese military, which in the movie’s setting built the Great Wall as a rampart against these monsters. Namely, controversy previously broke out last year after the release of early trailers of the film, with some seeing the casting of Matt Damon in a role that seemed as if it should go to Asian actors a sign of Hollywood “whitewashing”-the casting of white actors in roles that logically should go to Asians or other people of color. As such, we might critically reflect on the controversy now that the film has been released and can be judged on its own terms.
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AFTER THE “whitewashing” controversy over The Great Wall starring Matt Damon, although it has not yet hit the American shores in which the majority of the backlash against the film was concentrated, the film is finally out. Willem Dafoe, Pedro Pascal, Andy Lau, Tian Jing, Eddie Peng, Numan Acar, Han Lu, Kenny Lin, and Zhang Hanyu star alongside Damon. An "epic length" trailer was released earlier this month.
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The Great Wall hits theaters in China on December 16, and in the U.S. You have to educate yourself and then make your attack so that it's easier to listen from both sides.
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But ultimately I feel like you are undermining your own credibility when you attack something without seeing it. But it's a perspective as a progressive person I really do agree with and try to listen to and try to be sensitive to. I will be surprised if people watch it and have that reaction. And I will think about that and I will try to learn from it. And, ultimately, where I come down is if people watch the movie and still believe there's whitewashing involved in it, in a creature feature that we made up, then I will listen to it with my whole heart. I watched the trailer a number of times to understand the criticism. Back in October at New York Comic Con, Damon went in depth into his reaction to the criticism: Though the story is making the way around the news cycle today, it's not the first time Damon has addressed this same topic in a similar way. "Once you've seen the film you'll see it's not like that," Damon said of the role, which he and director Zhang Yimou say was never intended for a Chinese actor, though the movie, Zhang's first English language production, is intended to bring Chinese culture to Western audiences.
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People fall for outrageous headlines, but "eventually you stop clicking on some of those more outrageous things because you just realize there is nothing to the story when you get to it." "It suddenly becomes a story because people click on it, versus the traditional ways that a story would get vetted before it would get to that point," Damon said. "When I think of 'whitewashing' I think Chuck Connors playing Geronimo, that's whitewashing and that's unacceptable," Damon said at a press event in Beijing, as covered by Reuters, though he seemed to be describing the practice known as redface, rather than whitewashing. A report on Time from the same event features further comments from the actor on the subject, saying that the complaints couldn't have existed before social media. Um actually, Matt Damon doesn't see whitewashing in that way.