TL;DR – A dull, dreary production that is screaming to find something of substance, but it never happens.  

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid to watch this film

In the Lost Lands Review –

There is a genre of film that exists when you pair Paul W. S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich up, most notably found in the many Resident Evil films. There is a visual and narrative styling to these films that you can see even when they jump into different universes like Monster Hunter. It is a style that some people love, but I have struggled in the past. However, we will see if today is different.  

So, to set the scene, the world as we know it is gone, destroyed in a great war long ago. Now, there is only one real human city left under the control of ‘the church’ and ‘the overlord’. Outside of those walls is where the Lost Lands can be found. Full of danger and monsters. In that one city can be found Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich), a witch that is sometimes hunted by the church for heresy and other times sought out by those in power to do favours that she can never refuse. When Queen Melange (Amara Okereke) seeks the skin of a shapechanger, Gray needs to find a hunter who can help, and in the gambling halls, she sees the one person who can ford the Lost Lands, Boyce (Dave Bautista).   

While I profoundly struggled with this film, some rays of light helped get me through it. To begin with, I would say that Dave Bautista and Milla Jovovich do make an effective team. They are really trying to bring that script to life and make it work. Some of the action set pieces are interesting, with the highlight being the fight over the abyss. Helped by Gray’s witch power being this interesting blend of suggestion an illusion. Also, Arly Jover absolutely owns the character of Ash and has one of the most badass moments I have seen in cinema in a while. It also helps that she is the one character who is allowed to have some sort of colour in her costume.

However, I am going to be honest with you: I really struggled to connect with this film in any way. The worldbuilding is paper thin in many fundamentally frustrating ways. We have seen the ‘one last human city on Earth’ done so many times and, frankly, done a lot better elsewhere. A lot of elements just feel like they are dropped in with no real thought behind them, which you really start seeing when they start exploring the themes of power and revolution. I am not sure if this is a problem that stems from just the film or also from the source material, but it was a real missed opportunity to give the film some substance. The editing is a hectic mess that robs any momentum and flow from the dialogue. Also, there were scenes where the dialogue did not match the mouth shapes in a painfully obvious way.

But its worst crime might be just how dull everything is: a sepia-washed-out nothingness. Not every film needs the vibrant colour pallet of Wicked. Still, we have gotten a lot of post-apocalyptic settings recently, and all of them were more visually interesting than this mess, even when it was just different types of desert.        

In the end, do we recommend In the Lost Lands? Unfortunately, not. Nothing in this film came together for me, and I profoundly struggled to stay engaged with the movie throughout its runtime. Have you watched In the Lost Lands? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.If you liked Film Title, we would recommend to you Fallout.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of In the Lost Lands
Directed by – Paul W. S. Anderson
Screenplay by – Constantin Werner
Story by – Paul W. S. Anderson & Constantin Werner
Based on – In the Lost Lands by George R. R. Martin
Music by – Paul Haslinger
Cinematography by – Glen MacPherson
Edited by – Niven Howie
Production/Distribution Companies – Constantin Film, Spark Productions, FilmNation Entertainment, Dream Bros. Entertainment, Rusalka Film, Vertical & Roadshow Entertainment
Starring – Dave Bautista, Milla Jovovich, Arly Jover, Amara Okereke, Fraser James, Simon Lööf, Deirdre Mullins, Sebastian Stankiewicz, Jacek Dzisiewicz, Tue Lunding, Ian Hanmore & Eveline Hall  
Rating – Australia: M; Canada: na; Germany: 16; New Zealand: na; United Kingdom: 15; United States: R