Review of The Lost City of Z (2017) by Gozi — 22 Apr 2017

The Lost City of Z deserves a good rating for its cinematography and the fact that it has many spectacular individual moments.. The scenes in the jungle are beautifully shot and fill you with wonder and mystery which I expected coming into this movie. The scene where the explorers stumble onto an opera theater in the middle of the jungle is a great example. Its strange but luring to watch. You're mystified and filled with a feeling of exotic pleasure.

The biggest problem however, is that these moments do not come together to fill a cohesive narrative. There's three journeys depicted in the film, which are abruptly interrupted with scenes of British high class people mingling at parties, as well as very underdeveloped scenes of the main character's family. The movie also decided to tackle some WWI action scenes and somehow relate it to the main story, but it all felt very unorganized. One of the WWI scenes shows a fortune teller talking to Fawcett about his destiny to find this lost city while he's with his soldiers in a trench in France. It felt so forced, that I giggled a bit while I was watching it. I mean, he's at war. There's Germans shooting at him. Why do all of his soldiers care about his dumb expedition to the jungle? Go focus on the war...

The other BIG reason this movie gets a bump down in rating for me is Charlie Hunnam. Have you seen him in Pacific Rim? He's a horrible actor. He tries to put on his big boy pants for this role, but he's in way over his head. He overacts too much and then loses all subtlety when it matters most. He has this look he always gives.. like this dumb english smirk he does as he thinks "look I can make good acting faces. See? See me acting like a big boy actor?" But no one buys it. Robert Pattinson is fine, but doesn't talk all that much. Sienna Miller is pretty good too, nothing to ride home about. The side characters are just there to be side characters, that's it. The jungle scenes do save this movie though, even though each of the three journeys feel rushed and incomplete. If they had made robert pattinson the main character, worked on pacing better, fleshed out the supporting characters more, and made each journey a bit more complete, its a great movie. The ending is unsatisfying, but hey its history. Not much the filmmakers can do about that.