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Bungee jumper soldiers
- What was the point of the Crane Troops jumping off with a spear, if the first battle showed them to be very ineffective? Were they used in previous Tao Tie attacks, or was this a one-time experimental new strategy that was quickly nixed?
- It is made clear in the movie that the Tao Tie shown here are more intelligent than previous attacks; likely the Crane Troops were more effective when the Tao Tei lacked the tactical awareness to become aware of what was coming at them from above.
- They were probably originally meant to take out individual Tao Tei that try to clamber up the Wall. Now that the creatures have gotten smarter, the Cranes end up confronting organized packs of Tao Tei gathering to form a monster-pyramid, and get overwhelmed.
Tovar's nationality
- Is Tovar supposed to be a Spaniard? It seems odd how he is portrayed by a Hispanic actor, which is from Central America but colonized by Spain, and not an actual native of Spain?
- First, Pascal is Chilean, not Central American (though his Gratuitous Spanish does come off as Mexican despite not sounding like that in English, go figure). I don't know if he has any indigenous ancestry but he doesn't look like he has much if any. He has one of those faces that could be from half the countries in the world. As for Tovar, he's presumably Castilian for a number of reasons: Pero is an Old Castilian form of Pedro, and Tovar is a village in Old Castile and a Castilian noble surname first attested in the early 13th century (i.e. the tail end of the Song Dynasty when the movie supposedly takes place). His gear looks more Central Asian Turkic than anything but we could excuse that in him being a mercenary. William's own doesn't look very English either.
Willam's accent
- Is he intended to be Irish or British? There wasn't a clear mention and Matt Damon kept switching between the two.
Every sixty years
- Why do the Tao Tie attack only once every sixty years? What do they eat in the meantime, and how fast does the queen breed?
- And why don't humans launch any expeditions during the calm periods? At least they they could provoke landslide with black powder time bombs in that choking valley, killing everything moving through.
- Considering the scale of the threat the Tao Tei pose when attacking the Wall, there are probably concerns about whether an expeditionary force would get close enough to the Tao Tei to attack their nest with sufficient force to do any damage, and might even provoke an earlier attack anyway.
The first attack
- How did the people survive the first attack after the Tao Tie first arrived? They built the wall to keep the monsters out, but if they attacked first before the wall was built, then how was there anyone left to build the wall?
- My guess is that their first attack was relatively weak allowing the Chinese army to halt them in the open field. Either that or existing border fortresses were enough at the time.
- This could work, particularly when factoring in references to the Tao Tei becoming more tactically experienced as time goes on.
Hive mind
- Why did the Tao Tei all drop dead once the queen is killed? It would make sense if they became chaotic, disorganized, and started mindlessly attacking each other, but they just, like, froze in their tracks and died on the spot?
- It was established through a lot of shenanigans with the magnet chunk that being cut off from the queen makes the creatures docile and motionless. I'm not sure they died immediately, but that's the same here.
The blades in the wall
- In the second battle we see that they have spinning blades that emerge from the wall to chop up any climbing Tao Tei. Why don't they just constantly keep the blades going, being their most effective weapon?
- The aliens aren't dumb. The Wall only held out so long because it had so many different weapons. Rely on one, and it will be overrun.
- Also, keeping them constantly going would require someone to constantly be present to crank the handle, or whatever it is that powers them.
- Judging by the comparative efficacy of other defences, they had to have used these blades during previous times or else they would've been overrun for sure.
