The Lost City of Z (2017)

The Lost City of Z (2017)

IMDB Rating : 7.1/10 (as on 16.04.2017)

PG-13 | 2h 21min | Action, Adventure, Biography

A true-life drama, centering on British explorer Col. Percival Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s.

Director: James Gray

Writers: James Gray (written for the screen by), David Grann (based on the book by)

Stars: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller

IMDB link Here

The Lost City of Z Is a Mysterious, Enthralling Masterpiece

 DAVID SIMS

An essential job of great epic cinema is to conjure the unimaginable for viewers, to create glorious sights and give them depth and context, to try and take in the beauty of the natural world while also grappling with its terrifying force. James Gray’s The Lost City of Z succeeds in this task. A film about venturing into the unknown, it delves into mysteries that will never fully be solved and digs into the mindset of an explorer. But beyond that, it wants to depict the search for meaningful fulfillment, to try and understand why someone might risk life and limb in pursuit of the sublime.

The Lost City of Z is a miraculous movie, at once moving, intimidating, and gorgeous to behold. It’s a tale of colonial exploration that’s aware of the sins of the past, and a portrait of a driven, obsessive, flawed male protagonist that avoids the clichés of the genre. It feels like a work of classic Hollywood cinema, but without the arch, mannered quality that can come with a contemporary director trying to harken back to the past. Gray’s film is beguiling and poetic, capable of gluing you to the screen for every second of its languorous 150-minute running time and lingering in the brain for weeks after.

Adapted from David Grann’s 2009 work of non-fiction, The Lost City of Z follows Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), a British military man-turned-explorer who first ventured into the Amazon rainforest at the turn of the century. At first, Fawcett was dispatched as a surveyor, but eventually he became convinced there was evidence of a lost civilization hidden in the jungle, one as technologically advanced as any in the ancient world. Accompanied by a salty aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson), and, later, by his own son Jack (Tom Holland), Percy returned again and again to the Amazon in search of evidence he could bring home, flying in the face of then-held beliefs about the intellectual limits of “primitive” societies.

I haven’t gravitated toward Hunnam as an actor in the past, since he’s so often slotted into handsome leading-man roles entirely lacking in dimensionality (as in Pacific Rim). But as Percy, he’s sensational. His character is driven and haunted, but not insane or unfulfilled, given his happy marriage to Nina (Sienna Miller) and his obvious love for his three children. Hunnam portrays Percy’s fixation on the Amazon as something that’s not easily dismissed: A mix of ego, a desire for fame, and genuine intellectual fascination keeps pulling him back into a life of danger and long separation from his family.

The director never loses sight of the natural wonders he’s trying to capture, or of the nebulous mysteries Percy is trying to fathom. Gray has long been a favorite of cineastes, but I’ve often found his work (such as 2007’s crime thriller We Own the Night or 2013’s period drama The Immigrant) gorgeous but frustratingly remote, technically well executed but emotionally distant. The Lost City of Z bridges those gaps—it’s beautiful to look at, but what makes it unforgettable is its deep compassion for its characters and their inner lives. It’s the best film of the year thus far, and it’ll be a hard one to top.

 Read full review at TheAtlantic

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟☆☆  

Lush jungle adventure

Wendy Ide

Terrible diseases, murderous savages.” Not to mention waters that boil with piranhas: Col Percival Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is prepared to face all of this and more on a mapping expedition to Bolivia. His hope is that a successful mission will help him excise the shame that clings to his family name like some parasitic growth. But in fact, in James Gray’s uneven account of a real-life explorer’s obsession with Amazonia, Fawcett discovers that he feels more alive picking leeches out of his armpit hair than he ever did in the drawing rooms of polite society.

A nod to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is one – a gorgeously odd segment in which Fawcett and his team stumble upon an opera performance deep in the heart of the jungle. And music in general is key. The score, by Christopher Spelman, is a glorious, transcendent surge and swell, which evokes both the lush orchestral compositions of old Hollywood and the devotional music of John Tavener. Together with the colour-saturated reverence of Darius Khondji’s photography, it captures the wonder and the spiritual element of Fawcett’s travels.

In contrast to the score, Hunnam doggedly sticks to one note for his underwhelming performance. Robert Pattinson may be in a supporting role and almost entirely covered in beard, but he is considerably more interesting to watch. You ultimately find yourself wishing that his character, rather than the dashing but dull Fawcett, was the focus of the film.

Read full review at The Guardian 

Hearts of Darkness and Light in ‘The Lost City of Z’

MANOHLA DARGIS

In “The Lost City of Z,” a lush, melancholic story of discovery and mystery, a mesmerizing Charlie Hunnam plays a British adventurer in the Amazon who is consumed by “all the glories of exploration,” as Joseph Conrad once wrote of a different journey. Enveloped by the forest, the explorer and his crew face snakes, piranhas, insects and that most terrifying of threats: other people, who at times bombard the strangers with arrows. Undaunted, he perseveres, venturing more deeply into a world that first becomes a passion and then something of a private hallucination. It’s 1906, and while wonders like moving pictures are rapidly shrinking the world, the dream of unknown lands endures.

That dream isn’t only about the Amazon in “The Lost City of Z” but also about the movies and their ability to transport us to astonishing new worlds. For us, the Age of Discovery is long gone and, for the most part, so are old-fashioned historical epics, other than the occasional Chinese extravaganza or one of those international waxworks with clashing accents. Hollywood used to churn these out regularly, but they’ve faded, casualties of shifting industry logic, audience taste, cultural norms and other pressures. The romance of adventure has largely shifted from history to fantasy fiction, an easier, less contested playground for conquering white heroes.

In “The Lost City of Z,” the writer-director James Gray has set out to make a film in the colonial era that suggests the likes of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” but through a sensitive, contemporary lens. The story that Mr. Gray has chosen seems an unlikely candidate for such revisionism because it turns on Lieut. Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who came to believe in the existence of a lost Amazonian civilization. He called it the lost city of Z; others called it El Dorado, a European illusion that proved catastrophic for the New World.

Mr. Gray, working from David Grann’s 2009 book, “The Lost City of Z,” glosses over Fawcett’s more noxious beliefs. Mr. Grann, for one, writes that Fawcett “escaped virtually every kind of pathology in the jungle, but he could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race.” It’s no surprise that the real Fawcett was as fascinatingly contradictory as you might expect of a Victorian-born British explorer. Mr. Gray doesn’t soften all of these uncomfortable edges — there is arrogance and tinges of cruelty in this portrait — but he’s far more interested in what seems to have distinguished Fawcett, namely his passionate belief that Amazonian Indians were not the primitives the West insisted they were.

That passion sends Fawcett back to the Amazon several more times over the years, eventually becoming a kind of steadily devouring fever. He’s hailed as a hero after he returns from his first trip, but by the time he’s home he has a new child, whose birth he missed. This sets the template for his life, as Fawcett increasingly gives himself over to the Amazon and neglects his family, a familiar divide that Mr. Gray turns into the story’s axis point. In most movies of this type, the great man kisses the little woman goodbye and sets off. Here, partly because Fawcett repeatedly returns home, Nina emerges as a substantial narrative force and not only a reminder of what he’s willing to sacrifice.

Fawcett finds ecstasy in and out of the Amazon, as does Mr. Gray, who fills the screen with intimate reveries and overwhelming spectacle, including a harrowing interlude during World War I. Until now, Mr. Gray has tended to work on a somewhat modest scale, often with art films that play with genre. Here, he effortlessly expands his reach as he moves across time and continents and in the process turns the past into a singular life. There’s much to love in this film, but what lingers are those lapidary details that often go missing in stories about great men, as if they had built the world alone and no child had ever raced down a road waving goodbye as a father disappeared into history.

Read full review at New York times

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Transporting and profound, The Lost City of Z is an instant classic

Robbie Collin

Rudyard Kipling understood what made Percy Fawcett tick. In his 1898 poem The Explorer, Kipling wrote of a man spurred to adventure by a voice – not a divine, cloud-parting rumble, but a relentless inner whisper, needling him with the prospect of wonders “lost behind the Ranges”, waiting for discovery to make them real.

Fawcett heard that voice and heeded it. Born in 1867, he was an archaeologist and Colonel in the Royal Artillery, who became convinced, during a series of mapping expeditions to the Amazon, that somewhere in the jungle was a city of gold and maize – so ancient it perhaps predated western civilisation itself. The evidence was sparse and tenuous: handed-down native testimony, caches of pottery and sculpture, strange sigils carved in rock. But Fawcett couldn’t rest until he’d seen where the river led.

That journey to the river’s source – as much a voyage of the mind as a trek through real-world undergrowth – is the stuff of James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, a film as transporting, profound and staggering in its emotional power as anything I’ve seen in the cinema in years. As a piece of historical drama (it was adapted by Gray from the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann) it’s sincere and scrupulous.

As a work of filmmaking, it’s an immediate classic, fit to stand beside the best of Werner Herzog and Stanley Kubrick – though it’s also entirely its own thing, classical to its bones yet not quite like anything that’s come before it. In earlier films like The Immigrant and We Own The Night, I’ve occasionally found Gray’s careful, level-headed style a little distancing and hard to love. After this one, I had to retrieve my soul from the ceiling with a long-handled feather duster.

Fawcett is wonderfully played by Charlie Hunnam, the heartthrobby star of the TV series Sons of Anarchy and the Guillermo del Toro films Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak. It’s a role built on complex, not-obviously-cinematic qualities like decency, honour and conviction, but Hunnam brings them to life with total persuasiveness.

The Lost City of Z isn’t straightforwardly religious, but the possibility of an afterlife of sorts is suggested in Fawcett's  shifting relationship with his eldest son, which may be the most beautiful thing in the film. Late on, there’s a shot of the father standing on the prow of a low hill, watching his boy shoot rabbits. The older man, once the centre of attention, has become a small silhouette in his own story as he watches his son race into the foreground. In context, it’s one of the most acute and overpowering expressions of fatherhood on film I’ve ever seen.

Most period dramas would be content if you left the cinema able to pick out their particular place in history. The Lost City of Z asks you to contemplate your own. It’s a film that knows every life is a stretch of the same great river, whose golden source remains forever just around the bend, and out of sight.

Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating 🌟🌟☆☆☆  

More like Zzzzzz... Incredible-but-true story of a British explorer is turned into a plodding, frustrating, charisma-free disaster

MATTHEW BOND

The Lost City Of Z is a film about the sporadically forgotten Brit­ish explorer Percy Fawcett, who was born in the Victorian era, became a hero of the First World War and, either side of that dreadful conflict, travelled to South America to do all sorts of dangerous exploring. If he didn’t actually wear a pith helmet, I suspect he probably should have done.

Fawcett’s story is a thoroughly British one and yet the film of that story has been made by three Americans. David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote the book on which the film is based, Brad Pitt’s Plan B company produced it, and it has been directed and adapted for the screen by James Gray, hitherto best known – and indeed well-respected – for gritty New York dramas of the modern era.

Dialogue, characterisation, action… nothing hits the spot reliably enough for that vital suspension of disbelief. There’s no feeling of truth, no sense of reality on show here.

Notably lacking in screen charisma, Hun­nam manages to turn Fawcett – a man who reportedly inspired the likes of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle and, more recently, is said to provide the template for the character of Indiana Jones – into a humourless, self-centred know-all, convinced that he is right and everyone else wrong about there being an ancient lost city somewhere in the heart of the Amazonian jungle.

But this is not the Eldorado of golden myth, this is Z, so named by him because it provides ‘the last piece of the human puzzle’.

Thanks to Hunnam’s thoroughly underwhelming performance – much of it earnestly whispered, as is the modern fashion – it’s not so much Z as Zzzzzzzz...

Sorry, Charlie, but – despite the regular attacks from indigenous tribes and the ­inevitable talk of cannibalism – it’s all so dry, all so boring.

Watching him on screen, I did wonder if he’d been cast because of a passing resemblance to his producer, Pitt, but I also found myself fervently hoping this is a one-off disappointment.

Because Hunnam is having something of a moment and I’d been looking forward both to Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword and to the remake of Papillon – both of which Hunnam is starring in – until this.

But the casting is odd almost right across the board. Sienna Miller may be jarringly modern, but at least she’s modestly watchable as Fawcett’s oft-abandoned wife, Nina, but, elsewhere, Robert Pattinson is both unrecognisable and under-used as his right-hand man Henry Costin, while Spider-Man fans will be disappointed by the small part their man, Tom Holland, has to play as Fawcett’s son, Jack.

When quite so much goes wrong, it’s ­inevitable that blame falls on the director, who ought to be providing the film with its overall vision.

But Gray doesn’t seem to have one. His screenplay is particularly disappointing, beginning somewhere near the middle and then simply plodding laboriously on in a disjointed and episodic manner, as Fawcett makes a series of disaster-prone expeditions to the Amazon in pursuit of his elusive dream.

I quite liked the strange, unresolved ending, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to send others out on to the street gnashing their teeth in frustration.

After all, at well over two hours, it’s not a short film and there will be many who want something more concrete than what we’re offered here.

Sadly, it’s not just Z that’s got lost along the way.

Read Full review at Daily Mail

James Gray's Resplendent Lost City of Z Speaks to the Explorer in All of Us

Stephanie Zacharek

James Gray’s resplendent, symphonic Lost City of Z, adapted from David Grann’s 2009 nonfiction book, is the kind of grand adventure epic few people know how to make anymore, a movie whose beginning—in staid Edwardian Great Britain—takes place a world away from its eerie, dreamlike ending. Charlie Hunnam stars as real-life British explorer Percy Fawcett, who, in 1925, disappeared in the Amazonian jungle while seeking a long-lost civilization. Others doubted its existence, but Fawcett was sure in his bones, and in his heart, that it was real. He devoted his life to locating it.

Gray’s movies are hugely popular with French critics and audiences. He has passionate defenders in the States, but his pictures are never greeted with the awe reserved for, say, noted auteur types like Terrence Malick or Wes Anderson. That could be because Gray's pictures are sometimes bracingly out of style. He’s an old-school craftsman, an heir to filmmakers like George Stevens (Shane, A Place in the Sun)—his movies are intimate and expansive at once, and he has a love for, and an understanding of, melodrama: He's unafraid of intense emotions, written out in a filmmaking language that’s bold yet fine-grained, and audiences today seem to have lost touch with that vocabulary.

It’s to Gray’s credit that he keeps speaking it, and with a more nuanced degree of artistry each time. His actors reach out to meet him: As Fawcett, Hunnam is noble without being unbearable, summoning the perfect blend of ardor and understatement. Robert Pattinson is wonderful as Henry Costin, Fawcett’s solemn, bearded, no-nonsense aide-de-camp. We barely see his eyes—they’re half hidden by small John Lennon-style glasses—but his bearing alone tells us what he’s thinking every minute. Sienna Miller, luminous and astute, is Fawcett’s wife Nina, who supports his outsized dreams even as the couple’s eldest son, Jack (Tom Holland, soon to be seen in the Spider-Man reboot), nurses boyish resentments. This is a family drama, too, and the intricate dynamics of the Fawcetts’ marriage, and Jack’s relationship with his father, unspool in a way that’s both believable and moving.Gray can tell a whole backstory with just one shot. In an early scene, we see Fawcett’s red officer’s uniform laid out on a bed, looking soft and regal by lamplight, ready for the fancy ball he’s about to attend with his wife. A Jack Russell terrier runs up and performs a cursory, interrogatory sniff. It’s a tableau that both outlines what’s expected of a gentleman and shows how false it all is: The handsome-looking uniform means nothing without a body in it. The aristocratic-looking dog is really just a classic maker of mischief. In one of the most wondrous scenes, Fawcett and his team of Amazon explorers communicate with a frightened and aggressive tribe of Indians by breaking into a celebratory popular song of the day, “Soldiers of the Queen,” accompanied by concertina: Music speaks not only louder than words, but better. Pictures with the grand sweep and dreamy energy of The Lost City of Z don’t come along every year—they barely come along at all. This is itself a message in a bottle, a missive from a lost city of movies.

Read full review at TIME

Todd McCarthy

The compelling and quixotic true story of a British army officer who, a century ago, ventured into uncharted realms of the South American jungle in search of a presumed ancient civilization, The Lost City of Z is a rare piece of contemporary classical cinema; its virtues of methodical storytelling, traditional style and obsessive theme are ones that would have been recognized and embraced anytime from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Based on David Grann's 2009 best-seller, writer-director James Gray's screenplay can include only a fraction of the arcane historical and cultural information conveyed in a nonfiction book. It also refrains from going in other possible directions, such as inventing adventures that didn't happen or attaching a fashionable modern ideological agenda about the white man's incursion into a native population's turf.

Rather, it honors the spirit of physical risk, intellectual curiosity, individual daring and self-sacrifice (of both body and sanity) required to explore the unknown, to discover more about our origins and to map the world, which even 100 years ago had not been fully accomplished. Under scrutiny here was the interior of South America and the origins of the Amazon (was it fated that Amazon Studios should acquire the film's North American theatrical rights?).

What the director and cinematographer Darius Khondji do achieve, however, is an eerie ease as the group moves up the river on a small barge, then genuine shock when the explorers are caught off guard by a flurry of arrows launched by natives who look like they're stepping out of the early Iron Age. Tribes both friendly and hostile occupy the Amazonian forest and, while Fawcett never knows which he'll encounter, he develops a special confidence that he won't be harmed; before long, a certain aura emanates from the man that persuasively argues for his singular talents as an explorer.

One welcome difference between The Lost City of Z and most films devoted to male adventure is that, here, the “downtime” spent with wife and family is alive and laced with potent push-and-pull. Gray clearly takes the conflict between domesticity and the call of the wild seriously and he's greatly helped by Miller, who really brings Nina Fawcett alive in a layered performance despite limited screen time. Also welcome is the lingering doubt about Fawcett's wisdom in bringing his untested son along on the final expedition, no matter the youngster's naive personal enthusiasm.

Executive producer Brad Pitt and then Benedict Cumberbatch were both set at various points to play Fawcett, either of whom would have tilted the film more toward being a star vehicle (and would no doubt have occasioned a bigger budget as well). This won't be the film that makes Hunnam a star, but, after not exactly popping in the likes of Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak, his fine, robust work here will be taken seriously. The performance ripens and matures as the character does; you take the man's fitness and stamina for granted, along with the ambition, but the handsome blond actor also effectively registers the character's evolving strategies of dealing with upper-class snobbery and authority, as well as his own growing sense of purpose and destiny. In the end, even if Fawcett may not rank in the upper echelon of enigmatic British explorer-heroes such as James Cook, Charles “Chinese” Gordon, Ernest Shackleton and T.E. Lawrence, you sense he's indisputably related.

Exquisitely shot (on celluloid) by Darius Khondji in Northern Ireland and the Colombian jungle, the film exceeds its limited means in every respect. Exemplifying its traditional aesthetic virtues is Christopher Spelman's score, which, in its vigor, beauty and unfailing efforts to amplify the narrative action, evokes past masters from Max Steiner to Miklos Rozsa.

Read full review atHollywood Reporter