Erik Adams
Depending on what kind of movie and game fan you are, the name Paul W.S. Anderson will either bring pure joy or absolute misery to mind. For years gamers (including some at this very publication) have trashed his adaptations of Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Mortal Kombat for any number of reasons: lack of fidelity to the games, questionable mixing of digital and practical effects, the performances of his wife and frequent star, Milla Jovovich. Personally, I’ve always been drawn to the way Anderson takes these concepts and opens them up to play within their worlds – which is why it pains me to say his new movie, a take on the George R.R. Martin short story “In the Lost Lands,” doesn’t do any of that. Even worse: It just isn’t any good.
“In the Lost Lands” was first published in the anthology Amazons II, a collection of fantasy stories by or about women. To be sure, the protagonist of Martin’s story remains, as Jovovich dives into the role of the witch Gray Alys (which is pronounced “Alice” – not that she should be mistaken for Alice, Jovovich’s character in the Resident Evil movies). But in their telling, Anderson and co-writer Constantin Werner rather oddly focus on the hunter Boyce, played by Dave Bautista. In the Lost Lands even begins with a winking direct address by Bautista emphasizing that there are “no happy endings,” before settling in and forgetting to give him any real characterization. But that’s the least worrying thing on display here.
In the Lost Lands is about how Gray Alys, a witch who’ll grant any wish (as long as the wisher can pay), gets roped into helping a queen attain the power of shapeshifting. Meanwhile, she’s also tasked with fulfilling a wish from one of the queen’s knights (and lovers): He doesn’t want the monarch to get these powers. In the course of fulfilling her conflicting duties, Gray Alys hires Boyce to help her cross the fabled Lost Lands in order to find a werewolf and kill him for his powers. (Got all that down?) Along the way, there are all sorts of insane religious fanatics, anonymous assassins, and dully designed monsters to combat. If I had to explain any of these things in depth, I would fail, not because I didn’t understand they’re there, but because they serve no greater purpose than setting up mind-numbingly ugly action sequence after mind-numbingly ugly action sequence.
Almost immediately, I was gripped by the realization that In the Lost Lands will largely look like a desaturated video-game cutscene – specifically from the late PS3 era (and perhaps some disastrous early PS4 cutscenes) – with an abundance of lens flares. It’s about as hideous as any episode of Love, Death and Robots that aims for “realism” in its visual effects – or, to be more scathing, like any The Asylum production trying desperately to imitate the aesthetics of Zack Snyder and George Miller on a shoestring budget. Practically every shot introduces more and more sources of light (you name it: lamps, lanterns, a big exhaust port that doubles as a skylight), or an atrocious, fake, washed-out sun, all of which only exist to create a hazy glare that takes over every frame. Sometimes, it even reflects off the cast’s foreheads .
Though Anderson’s brand of artificiality typically gets made fun of, there’s something truly amazing about how fluidly the “fake” and “real” interact in his Monster Hunter. There’s a weight to everything onscreen, and a certain filmmaking energy that elevates the most obvious special effects. But there’s barely anything practical or engaging to In the Lost Lands. Its grandest action sequences are hard to watch, cobbled together from what looks like a handful of awkward takes in front of green screens with patently bogus vfx animals and monsters mixed in. If anything nails the action-adventure targets Anderson is trying to hit, it’s Arly Jover’s truly unhinged performance as someone desperate to kill Gray Alys, which wouldn’t feel out of place in a movie from the genre’s ’90s heyday. The precious few moments when In the Lost Lands actually looks gorgeous are limited to interiors in which characters drum up suspense by navigating unfamiliar spaces or spark up a little intimacy.
Perhaps it’s foolish to look for nuance in a film directed by Anderson. But when it’s based on a story of melancholic travels and the perils of desiring that which we can’t have, it’s hard not to fault it for being so shallow. The movie is at its best during stripped down scenes that are shockingly well lit or in largely conversational moments between the leads in the darkness of the world. It’s there that Werner and Anderson hew closer to the source material, honing in on moments of human connection between Alys and Boyce, and when In the Lost Lands reveals itself as something that could have been great.
We’ve seen what both Bautista and Jovovich can do as performers with emotionally weighty material: Look at Knock at the Cabin or even Resident Evil Retribution. But they rarely get the chance to show that depth here. Their performances are still interesting – particularly that of Jovovich, who tries to straddle the line between Alys’ playful wiseness and her exhaustion at going through the motions of wish fulfillment. But In the Lost Lands is too concentrated on vfx sludge and the image of Jovovich dual-wielding (something her husband loves to put on screen) to ever plumb such a rich undercurrent.
Whether or not you’re a fan of his work, Paul W.S. Anderson’s films have never felt as lifeless as this one, or as uncommitted to the heightened goofiness and action. That’s what makes the fairly action-free parable of In the Lost Lands such an odd choice for adaptation, resulting in an approach to character-based fantasy as misguided as Nikolaj Arcel’s stupefyingly bad version of The Dark Tower. In Anderson’s hands, a somber work fixated on the futility of fantasy sadly becomes an anonymous mess.
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