Pairing director Paul W.S. Anderson with wife and frequent leading lady Milla Jovovich, and based on a short story by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, In the Lost Lands is a multi-pronged match made in genre heaven.
A mash-up of his Resident Evil: Apocalypse and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road that’s as gleefully over-the-top as it is absurdly generic, the auteur’s latest, in theaters March 7, is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror Western about futuristic gunslingers, supernatural sorceresses, angry demons, and ferocious werewolves. As if that weren’t enough to fill out this ultra-violent saga, it also features Dave Bautista as a nomadic desperado who fells adversaries with his beloved two-headed snake. For sheer unadulterated geekiness, it’s got few contemporary equals.
In the aftermath of a great war that turned civilization into smoldering ruins, the remainder of mankind lives in a walled-off city run by the Overlord (Jacek Dzisiewicz), who’s on the verge of death. Angling to fill the forthcoming power vacuum left by his demise is Patriarch Johan (Fraser James), a religious villain who commands a bloodthirsty cult, and Queen Melange (Amara Okereke), who’s yet to provide her elderly spouse with an heir.
Both these individuals want to sit on a throne located in a palace that resembles a steampunk Castle Grayskull, and the Patriarch and his fanatical right-hand woman Ash (Arly Jover) are consumed with killing Gray Alys (Jovovich), a witch with a fondness for hooded robes whose otherworldly abilities mark her as a heretic and potential rebel leader—and, at outset, help her escape an execution by hanging, much to Ash’s fury.
Gray Alys can bewilder adversaries with hallucinations simply by staring into their eyes—a trick that Anderson visualizes with hazy, throbbing close-ups of her pupils. For Queen Melange, however, Gray Alys is most valuable because she can grant people wishes. “I refuse no one,” says the witch, and since the Queen wants to become a lycanthropic shapeshifter, Gray Alys must venture In the Lost Lands from which she hails.
Before embarking on her quest, she enlists the services of Boyce (Bautista), a mysterious cowboy who moseys into town on horseback, takes out a cadre of ne’er-do-wells, and then shares a bit of private time with the Queen, who simultaneously has her hooks in Overwatch guard leader Jerais (Simon Lööf).
In the Lost Lands doesn’t pretend that it’s anything more than a rehash of multiple famed ancestors (including, additionally, Blade Runner, Fallout, and Anderson’s prior Monster Hunter). Yet the film has style to burn.
The director sets an evocative scene through glistening, painterly panoramas of burned-out wastelands that would be right at home in an issue of Heavy Metal, and his flashy signatures—characters running, sliding, and back-flipping in slow-motion; gruesome human-vs-creature skirmishes scored to industrial metal; double-fisting gunplay—contribute to the proceedings’ hard-charging intensity and out-of-this-world loveliness. Anderson has done all this before, but he does it better than most, elevating his hackneyed material through dexterous showmanship.
Boyce spends most of his time roaming the Lost Lands so he’s an ideal guide for Gray Alys, and he informs her that the beast she seeks—and which she’s seen in a vision mauling attackers from its POV—lives in a cave in Skull River. This is the final destination of a journey whose route is laid out by a graphical map which recalls those found in Martin’s more famous fantasy epic, and as they travel together, Gray Alys and Boyce slowly develop a friendship based on the latter’s belief that they’re kindred spirits. They’re certainly a formidable duo, whether they’re taking out baddies with metal claws and firearms or successfully fleeing Ash and her minions, who are in hot pursuit in a coal-powered train that boasts sharp spikes and spits angry fire.
Anderson remixes with aplomb and stages his mayhem with flair but he can’t make any of In the Lost Lands feel the least bit novel, and that clash—between beauty and banality—defines the film, right down to the contrast between the capable Jovovich and Bautista and their unknown, underwhelming co-stars.
Decorated with rune tattoos and wielding curved hand blades, Jovovich’s Gray Alys repeatedly pronounces that she can’t deny someone their wish and that “No one should ever ask me for help,” making her a striking and monotonous center of attention whose origins and powers are forever left undefined. Boyce, meanwhile, is a standard-issue archetype with his own ink-covered body and lethal skill set, and though the actor has decent chemistry with Jovovich, there’s little he can do to breathe life into his tired character.
That said, they look the part, and looks are paramount when it comes to In the Lost Lands. Anderson never misses an opportunity to craft a haunting tableau and his clean, detailed imagery and set pieces put most present-day blockbusters to shame.
Constantin Werner’s script (adapted from Martin’s original) is awash in momentous pronouncements and predictable surprises, but the director does as much as is humanely possible with the odyssey at hand, highlighted by a sequence in which Gray Alys and Boyce fend off attackers on a school bus that’s been retrofitted as a cable car designed to traverse a Grand Canyon-scaled ravine. It’s a case study in form trumping content, for better and worse.
In the Lost Lands is no different than legions of previous genre knockoffs that sought to carve out a distinctive identity by smushing together clichés, except that Anderson is a talented artist who genuinely knows how to frame a shot and orchestrate a big-budget showstopper. Be it compositions illuminated by blooming lens flares (the better to help obscure the CGI backgrounds), a zoom through an injured person’s bloody veins, or a snake-flying-at-the-screen moment that practically begs to be retrofitted in 3D (another favorite Anderson gimmick), the director turns the film into an ideal vehicle for his own trademarks.
In doing so, he continues his ideal collaborative partnership with Jovovich, who strikes a satisfying array of bada-- poses that render her protagonist’s one-note construction beside the point. Together, they indulge in so many overtly “cool” things that they actually deliver something reasonably cool—and reconfirm that, even in a lesser effort such as this, they’re the king and queen of the modern B-movie.
