Review: In the Lost Lands

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

In the Lost Lands is a movie produced to appeal to thirteen-year-old boys specifically. Its setting—a post-apocalyptic wasteland strewn with the rubble of a collapsed society (rusted skyscrapers, debris-cluttered railroad tunnels, ruined nuclear power plants) and populated by cardboard-thin stock characters (medieval knights, itinerant gunslingers, fanatical religious zealots, seductive femmes fatales, and enigmatic witches)—feels like it was reverse engineered from the evocative artwork adorning the cover of a bargain bin metal album or dog-eared fantasy novel. The narrative structure resembles that of the most generic video game imaginable: a bog-standard Hero’s Journey that follows our protagonists’ pursuit of the MacGuffin du jour across various spectacular landscapes (i.e., “levels”; the locations are even conveniently labeled on an animated overworld map, à la Super Mario Bros. 3 or Donkey Kong Country), occasionally interrupted by action-packed sword fights, shootouts, and chase sequences (during which I frequently found myself subconsciously reaching for my PS5 controller). The story is simultaneously childishly simplistic and needlessly convoluted; indeed, much of the third act revolves around retroactively justifying and explaining a deluge of eleventh-hour plot twists that were never previously foreshadowed. The central themes are shallow and insubstantial, the overarching conflict is muddled and borderline incomprehensible, the cinematography makes it obvious that the whole thing was shot on a soundstage (or possibly in the basement of an abandoned munitions factory hastily converted into a green screen studio)…

It is, in short, the quintessential Paul W.S. Anderson film—and, like the vast majority of his directorial efforts (Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator, Monster Hunter), I absolutely loved it, savoring every schlocky morsel. In the Lost Lands is enjoyable in spite of itself—hell, there’s an argument to be made that its glaring flaws are precisely what make it so endearingly entertaining. That’s Anderson in a nutshell, really: while his creative ambition often exceeds his talent, his work is rarely uninteresting.