Thursday, June 26, 2025

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): In the Lost Lands

2025, Paul WS Anderson (Resident Evil: Retribution) -- download

There's a lot to unpack in my head over this post-apocalyptic CGI fantasy movie from a director who apparently makes movies for his wife to star in. I rather enjoyed his previous romps with his wife, primarily his adaptations of the Resident Evil video games into ... something entirely different. They are terrible, but I find them terribly fun. They, at the very least, have somewhat of a focus to them. This one seems the opposite, unfocused and unsure of what it was doing beyond individual scenes, like trying to make a movie from someone's concept art portfolio.

This movie should be right down my alley. Its mythical, its fantastical, its post-apocalypse. It has monsters and magic, guns and swords, and even an Old West vibe. And noting my oft yelled complaint about lack of style, its has "style" in buckets.

The problem is that it was terrible, and not Fun Terrible, just plain terrible.

Earth, after an unnamed apocalypse, but harkening back to 80s scifi, very likely nuclear. Civilization is now boiled down to one city, a hell hole of a place dominated by an Overlord and a Church. Its people seem to spend all day digging in a strip mine for ... something; I don't remember, and its not any major part of the plot (plot???). If there are Churches, then there are witches, and this one is Gray Alys (Milla Jojovich, Monster Hunter), whose motif is to give a person whatever they ask of her, no matter the consequences. The movie opens with them failing to hang her.

And there is Boyce (Dave Bautista, Blade Runner 2049), a hunter (of what? not sure.) and anti-hero in a cowboy outfit with guns and a two-headed snake. When he's not fucking the Overlord's queen, he's wandering the Lost Lands. Gray Alys is approached by said queen with a request -- steal the power from a shapeshifter in the Lost Lands for her, so she can take control from her dying husband. Alys accepts, because she can refuse no one, and grabs Boyce from a bar on the way out of town.

There is a handy RPG style map of the path from the city to the lair with various points of interest along the way, all with cool po-ap names. They are pursued by members of the Church who steal a train and are lucky that Boyce's journey also happens to follow train tracks and that this po-ap world still has... a functioning rail system?!?! At any moment Boyce could have lost his pursuers by ... just taking another path, but implications of "epic adventures" are that there is "one safe path".

Like I already mentioned, the movie is not so much made of continuity but a vast series of visually stunning CGI backdrops connected by vibes. Unto themselves, they are lovely to look at and intricately built but as a movie... not so much. Dialogue is usually in three word bursts punctuated by grunts. Say something, cut to another CGI rendered scene, say something, move on, say something, burning skyline, say something, thundering train... you get the idea. The action scenes are commendable and impressive and probably the only contiguous thing in the whole movie.

If I was 14, I would have loved this movie. The riot of visuals would have overwhelmed much of my brain and just produced fodder for my D&D or Gamma World games, but Old Me is less impressed, and more easily annoyed.

If you are wondering what ended up happening plot-wise, it was supposed to be a twist that the shapeshifter was actually Boyce and everyone he leads into the Lost Lands, he ends up killing. We are supposed to get the idea that lots of people go into the Lost Lands to kill the werewolf, but the movie never says "why" -- it is a vibe of epic fantasy that heroes (there aren't any actual heroes in this movie, just anti-heroes) always seek out monsters to slay. Gray Alys does slay Boyce, does take his skin and then brings it to the Queen so she can depose her husband and the head of the Church but... well, it all just ends in a confused pseudo-epic muddle with Boyce alive again.

Meh.

I had to constantly tell me the movie was not called "Into the Lostlands", which is harkening back to a different po-ap TV series called "Into the Badlands", which I swore I would have written about, but the evidence is not to be found.

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