Director – Paul W.S. Anderson, Screenplay – Constantin Werner, Screen Story – Paul W.S. Anderson & Constantin Werner, Based on the Short Story In the Lost Lands by George R.R. Martin, Producers – Paul W.S. Anderson, Dave Bautista, Jeremy Bolt, Milla Jovovich, Robert Kulzer, Jonathan Meisner & Constantin Werner, Photography – Glen MacPherson, Music – Paul Haslinger, Visual Effects Supervisor – Dennis Berardi, Visual Effects – Herne Hill Media, Hotspring, No Label (Supervisor – Gawel Jacykow) & WeFX Inc. (Supervisor – Mo Ghorbankarimi), Special Effects Supervisor – Adolf Wojtinek, Makeup Effects Design – Klaudyna Goralska, Production Design – Lukasz Trzcinski. Production Company – Constantin Film/Spark Productions.
Cast
Milla Jovovich (Gray Alys), Dave Bautista (Boyce), Arly Jover (The Enforcer), Amara Okerke (The Queen), Fraser James (The Patriarch), Simon Lööf (Jerais), Jacek Dzisiewicz (The Overlord), Deidre Mullins (Mara), Sebastian Stankiewicz (Ross), Eveline Harris (Old Woman)
Plot
It is some time in the future after civilisation has collapsed. The land is ruled by the ailing The Overlord, who is backed by the autocratic hand of the Church. His consort The Queen comes to the witch Gray Alys and requests that Gray Alys find her the power of shapechanging. Gray Alys agrees to undertake the task but must do so before the full moon. To this end, she recruits Boyce to guide her across the Lost Lands to find the werewolf Sardor to steal its power. Pursuing them are The Enforcer and her armies from the Church, who regard Gray Alys as a witch who must be exterminated.
Paul W.S. Anderson is a director who has become synonymous with videogame adaptations. Anderson’s second directorial film was Mortal Kombat (1995) and he has since become most associated with the Resident Evil film series after making the first film Resident Evil (2002) and directing its fourth, fifth and sixth sequels Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016), as well as producing all the other films, during the course of which he also married the series star Milla Jovovich. He has also directed another videogame adaptation Monster Hunter (2020), also starring Milla Jovovich, and produced one other videogame film with DOA: Dead or Alive (2006). (See below for Paul W.S. Anderson’s films).
Many of the elements of Resident Evil have been assembled for In the Lost Lands – Paul W.S. Anderson, Milla Jovovich, the backing of Germany’s Constantin Film. They were clearly hoping to ignite something of the same all over again and spawn another franchise. The film is not based on a videogame, although for all intents and purposes feels as though it could be another Resident Evil films minus, the zombies.
The source in this case is a short story by George R.R. Martin, best known for the books that became the massive hit phenomenon known as tv’s Game of Thrones (2011-9). On screens, Martin has also served as a story editor on tv’s Beauty and the Beast (1987-90) and had a novella adapted as the film Nightflyers (1987) and its later tv series remake Nightflyers (2018).
Milla Jovovich as Gray Alys in action against church cultists
On the other hand, In the Lost Lands leaves you completely confused from the moment you start watching. The description involving witches and shapechangers suggests a fantasy setting. However, when the film opens, it seems to be a Post-Apocalyptic world where the landscape is littered with abandoned buildings, railway lines and repurposed vehicles – fairly much the same world that existed in the Resident Evil series. (It was the same case in Monster Hunter where Anderson adapted a videogame that had a fantasy setting and turned out anotherResident Evil copy). It proves confusing as the two worlds do not gel. Certainly, there have been animated works before such as Wizards (1977) and Rock and Rule (1983) that treat the post-apocalyptic world as one where talking animals have evolved and fantasy elements have prevailed. At its closest, In the Lost Lands suggests something of the world of the film Priest (2011), another film that suffered mixed genre confusions. This frustration with trying to work out what the world is dogs the entire film.
As with the Resident Evil films, it feels as though In the Lost Lands is little more than arranged around Paul W.S. Anderson’s action and effects sequences. There is one such with Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista escaping aboard an old bus that is being winched along a cable across a ravine at the same time as it is mobbed by attacking cultists and then the cable cut halfway through the traversal. As always, Anderson’s action sequences sit halfway between the imaginative and the absurd – the bus sequence does not too badly but the preceding scene where cultists jump out one after the other and sacrifice themselves to protect Arly Jover from Bautista’s bullets causes unintended titters. Later there is a battle in a flaming circle between what look like skeletons from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Groot from the Guardians of the Galaxy films.
Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista don’t exactly create any chemistry on the screen. The film is then completely hamstrung by a ridiculous twist that comes towards the end of the story. It is one that might have worked on paper if George R.R. Martin were creating the story as a fable, but in this environment seems absurd, not to mention is one that renders the entire purpose of the quest pointless.
