In The Lost Lands Movie Review - Someone Actually Made This
Huzzah! Another action movie directed by cinematic schlock slinger Paul W.S. Anderson starring with his wife, Milla Jovovich again! Will wonders never cease? We’ve seen them mutilate the Monster Hunter license, release a farce of Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers, and burn in effigy the beloved Resident Evil franchise with their torturous movies. So, what is Mr. Anderson going to obliterate next with his oh-so-striking film-making? A short story by George R.R. Martin that happens to be a part of an anthology made up of short fantasy novelettes by numerous fantasy authors called “Amazons II”. I have never read the anthology, nor have I even read the short story itself. So, going into this film, I had no earthly clue what to expect aside from it taking place in the post-apocalyptic ruins of our modern world combined with sorcery, religious cults and something about a character wishing for the power to shape-shift into a werewolf.
Now after doing some research of my own, the stuff about needing the power to transform into a werewolf is in the novella. However, from what I’ve noticed, the tale by R.R. Martin has much more complexity with the characters and tells more of an engaging medieval story about desire and the risks of chasing after one’s wish; being careful with what one wishes for. I don’t really think that comparing this movie to the short story is worth anyone’s time because this so-called adaptation is bad enough as its own contained, stand-alone film. In The Lost Lands is the most Paul W.S. Andersen movie that he has made in the last five to nine years. In other words, it is a total piece of crap. Looking at how we’re three months in, it looks like the competition is heating up for the title of Worst Movie of 2025. Hey, if anyone was going to review this movie that has only been released in 1,000+ theaters with microscopic box office results, it was going to be me. Plus, it’s not like this film will end up on streaming platforms and Blu-ray months from now.
In the realms of a ravaged landscape that tore the world apart through apocalyptic warfare, there is a powerful witch named Gray Alys who is known for granting anyone’s wish for a price. One day, Lady Melange, the wife of The Overlord, offers Gray Alys a task to fulfill her wish of attaining the ability to transform into a werewolf. As a woman who says no to any offer, she lets Melange know she’ll be given the power once she steals the powers from an actual werewolf. So she goes out on her quest with a fellow western hunter companion, Boyce, who informs her that to find the man who possesses that power, they both have to travel before the full moon to its lair, Skull River (feel free to laugh). Can they accomplish this goal while being constantly pursued by Ash—a religious cult commander under the rule of Patriarch Johan—and her soldiers (who are just religious versions of war boys from ‘Fury Road’) to arrest Gray Alys and try her for heresy?
Much like another filmmaker who carries the cinematic mark of Cain, Zack Snyder, Anderson is a filmmaker who concentrates on how cool something looks before anything else. The color grading of his shots, the hardcore western, post-apocalyptic aesthetic and costumes, the pace and shots of the action scenes, it’s all he cares about from frame one to the end. Where he fails is in the fundamental basics of making a movie and translating the exhausting script by Constantin Warner.
From the outset, the plot has our main villains acting so incredibly stupid as a means to continue the story, and even our heroes fall prey to putting people’s lives in danger for the sake of introducing a plot device or lowering the stakes in a ticking clock story-line. It also feels like a repetitive cycle of ‘fight scene, visit visually bleak and edgy vista, fight scene, visit visually bleak and edgy vista’. Except during the time our characters are in such locales, the film wastes your time with subpar character development and exposition dumps. In one instance, Boyce and Gray Alys visit a house. What purpose does this serve? Nothing, other than to show the audience that Boyce has a girlfriend and that her eventual death will play as motivation for Boyce scenes from now…until he stops caring about her and falls in love with Gray Alys and spends so little time with the romance that it makes it hard to buy their chemistry and affection (or lack thereof).
There’s not a single original bone in this movie’s body. Not an ounce of creativity or embellishment in the production design or world-building. It’s as if Anderson saw “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “The Book of Eli”, and crammed them all into an uninspired wrought of overused ideas. You have the white-painted war boy knock-offs, ruined buildings and spikey vehicle designs, several aesthetic choices, and the stronghold for our villains looks like a combination of Gastown, the Bullet Farm and the Citadel from “Fury Road”. Even sets like the Overlord’s throne room can also be shockingly cheap-looking, as if it was filmed on a sound stage for a metal band. Anderson, this is literally my cinematic forte! This is the post-apocalypse! You can literally do anything you want to make a world come alive taking place in the downfall of civilization. Is this the best you can come up with? Just lazy imitations of superior work?
The cinematography is disgusting. You have your handful of vapid, generic shots of our heroes on horseback riding in frame with or towards the sunset, including unnecessary close ups on character’s faces while pretending they’re horseback so you can get a wonderful look at how bad the green screen backdrop is. The editing makes the camerawork so much worse as the disorienting quick cuts in the set pieces and the repetitive slow motion make you wish for the film to end quicker. And let’s not forget about the movie’s obsession with J.J. Abrams lens flares. Lens flares everywhere! It becomes such an eyesore with how many there are in a single frame, you’d go blind. Like, Saul of Tarsus blind.
If the lens flares and the shoddy cinematography didn’t get you excited for your first Braille lessons, brace yourself for the ungodly CGI. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a two-headed rattlesnake with visual effects that made me drop my jaw to the floor. The fact that Paul W.S. Anderson even approved the movements and texture of its scales, fangs and overall design blows my mind. And when the werewolf finally shows up after suffering through a torturous hour and twenty, its design, texture, polish and animation are so vomit-projecting they makes the Keanu Reeves android from “Replicas” look like the Ents from “Lord of the Rings”.
Where Paul W.S. Anderson especially fails at what much like his directing capabilities, is directing his cast members to perform their parts and the majority of our actors deliver ground-breakingly bad performances. Amara Okereke is stilted and underwhelming as Melange, Arly Jover is ridiculously over the top and cartoonish as Ash, her lieutenant of her religious war boys, and Fraser James’s performance as Patriarch Johan is flabbergasting. It’s basically the same performance that Eddie Redmayne pulled off in “Jupiter Ascending” where every line is so quiet and sounds like he is gasping for air every time he speaks.
The more I watch Dave Bautista perform as an action hero or in any other project (with the lonely exceptions being projects directed by Denis Villeneuve and James Gunn), the more I realize just how bad of an actor he has become overtime. He’s just not capable of carrying an action lead role. His delivery is wooden and uncomfortably stoic, his charismatic attempts at humor and charm flatline and his ability to be dramatic and angry comes across as unintentionally hilarious.
As for Milla Jovovich, well, it’s kinda the same performance we’ve been desensitized to since the Resident Evil movies. She whispers a majority of her lines without a shred of conviction or emotion, and makes it very hard to believe anything that she is saying. Though, if I were to play devil’s advocate, of all the Hollywood actresses, it’s especially hard to find someone who could say such abhorrent dialogue like “I’ve never seen a man so emotionally attached to a snake before” with 100% sincerity. As far as her character goes, the film tries to make her feel like she is a threat to everyone she cares for because of how dangerous her powers are, but it fails because we never get a scene of what her life was like growing up as a witch, and how she seems to handle her powers effortlessly for good purposes. In fact, Gray Alys never suffers, never gets injured in a fight, never loses a game of cards, never has to come face to face with any moral conundrums, and is just incredibly good at everything whenever the script requires it, just like a lot of Jovovich’s characters in Anderson’s filmography.
Finally, the action scenes can all be described in two words: “Who cares?” Anderson’s yawn-inducing action motifs have returned on display, a la slow-motion shots accompanied by choppy close-up quick cuts. But every single one of these blood-drenched action set pieces is all the more boring and tension-less once you realize two things. First, our tag team’s plot armor is off the charts. Our heroes shoot through hordes of religious war boys with unlimited ammo and never get injured as the enemy charges at them with pick-axes and clubs. Even those who carry guns attend Stormtroopers University where they can’t seem to make a single shot or are too stupid to not get killed. One character even outruns an oncoming train in a tunnel heading straight towards ‘em.
Second, they don’t make any sense on any level. There’s an action scene that involves a hoard of zombie-like monsters in a nuclear power plant cooling toward what we’re told are afraid of fire…until they aren’t and are finished off in the easiest way possible, by one act of hypnosis and Gray Alys’s use of pyromancy. Another in which Gray Alys and Boyce are being chased by Ash and the religious war boys, and the two make it to an aerial tramway to get them to their destination. A bunch of religious war boys climb on to the tram while a couple fall to their death. As the cart is going, both Gray Alys and Boyce kill the religious war boys with ease…and yet somehow, someway, the religious war boys KEEP APPEARING ON THE TRAM! I kept thinking to myself, ‘where do they keep coming from’?! Apparently, Anderson has no regard for the logistics of his action sequences. There isn’t even a shot where several religious war boys are on top of the tram waiting for their turn. Basically, Paul W.S. Anderson committed the hand of God by popping more religious war boys into the frame because we need to pad out the action while showing how awesome his wife is.
Instead of what could’ve been “Mad Max” meets “Game of Thrones”, we get “Jonah Hex” meets “The Dark Tower” meets a random terrible installment of the “Resident Evil” movies. In The Lost Lands is a pale adaptation of more grounded and whimsical material that suffers from all of Anderson’s worst attributes as a filmmaker. From the direction of the story and its cast, to the action set-pieces, the awful dialogue and visual effects, the aftermath is a derivative, directionless disaster that accompanies exactly why Paul W.S. Anderson’s reputation is all but an afterthought.
In summation, Paul W.S. Anderson made a terrible movie. Again.
RATING: 0/5
