Rent The Lost City of Z (2016)

Jungle Bungle - The Lost City of Z review by Count Otto Black

Colonel Percy Fawcett was a curious man, and there's a good film to be made about him. Unfortunately this isn't it. Movies about real people are always difficult for Hollywood to shoehorn into its mould because very few of us manage to wrap up our stories with neat Hollywood endings. Fawcett devoted a large part of his adult life to perilously hacking through disease-ridden jungles in search of a lost city so legendary it didn't even have a name. Of course, this being a true story, he never found it because it didn't exist, and eventually his luck ran out and his obsession killed him. As a character study of a weird, mystically inclined, incredibly stubborn man whose own books, with their bizarre accounts of giant spiders and 60-foot snakes, seem to show that for him the border between fact and fantasy was always a little blurred, and with a wildly imaginative director like Terry Gilliam at the helm, this could have been an excellent movie.

Instead, the inevitable tampering with history happens in all the wrong places. Fawcett's character flaws and even his eccentricities are whitewashed away, and he becomes a passionate crusader for 21st. century right-on political correctness, spouting clichéd holier-than-thou anti-racist sermons in Edwardian England. His motive for abandoning his family to risk his life in search of a city so imaginary it's near-as-dammit called Oz is to show Europeans that their brown-skinned brothers are in no way inferior to white men, because if he can prove that so-called savages built a really impressive stone city in South America, racism will disappear overnight. Just like it did when the Inca and Aztec Empires were discovered by the Spanish conquistadors 400 years previously.

Deleting most of what makes Fawcett interesting to turn a selfish fantasist looking for something as real as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow into a more conventional hero doesn't solve the problem that in reality, Fawcett died trying to reach a non-existent place because he was too stubborn and egotistical to admit he'd been on a fool's errand all along. So the script has to wriggle out of it by heavily implying Z was real, and Fawcett would have found it had his noble quest not been sabotaged by an entirely fictitious character who is as clumsily boo-hiss politically incorrect and rotten as Fawcett is saintly, which briefly provides the nearest thing the story has to an actual plot. And the desperate attempt to avoid ending the film on a downer without telling complete lies is truly groan-inducing. Obscure C-list director James Gray isn't awful, he's simply workmanlike in a boring TV movie kind of way. Given such thin material to work with, Charlie Hunnam would have to be a truly superb actor to make Fawcett interesting, and he isn't. Sienna Miller's a lot better, but as the wife who gets left at home and therefore never does anything the slightest bit exciting, she ends up spouting PC feminism so predictable she even does the "how can men say women are weak when we have to bear the pain of childbirth?" rant.

This film obviously means well, but it takes a completely misguided approach to the true story of a Quixotic fool. As an "adventure" the goal of which is never accomplished and never could have been, it fails to thrill. Technically it's adequate at best, and in places the sound is very poor (oddly, the sound editor seems to have had more trouble recording audible dialogue on a studio set than in the middle of a rain-forest). And nobody likes being preached at. I'm giving it more than one star because at least it's not cynical, and all concerned are clearly doing their best. Unfortunately it's nowhere near good enough.

Incredibly dull - The Lost City of Z review by JS

Maybe some true stories just aren't fit to be made into movies. This would be an example. A rambling, unstructured story (a bit like much of real life), ending in a sort of anticlimactic non-ending. A couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back.

'Lost City of Z' review - The Lost City of Z review by IanF

I was hoping for an Indiana Jones type film with perhaps a tad more realism. What we get is a bit dark, a bit hopeless, a bit boring. The most interesting thing in it was Robert Pattinson's beard! I guess this is more like what archaeologist/ adventurers actually do. Hard to sit right through it. Good point a previous reviewer made - if you want to find out more about the real person portrayed, the 'extras' had quite a lot about him. Missed doing that as I couldn't wait to send it back.