Review: "In the Lost Lands" (Germany/Canada/USA, 2025)

A glance at Paul W.S. Anderson’s filmography does not inspire confidence, and that concern is proven valid for In the Lost Lands. Watching this production is a strange, almost surreal, experience because at no point does it seem like a movie even though it is being projected on a large screen. The film has a strong aesthetic – the dusty monochrome is pervasive – and the special effects are mostly effective but the narrative is so slight and the performances so artificial that the whole thing feels like an extended cut-scene from a video game. (Maybe that’s appropriate considering that Anderson is by far best known for his Resident Evil adaptations.)

The plot could be described succinctly (and accurately) as a story about a witch, Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich), and a warrior-hunter, Boyce (Dave Bautista), who fight lots of monsters as they travel across the blasted wasteland of a dystopian future of a quest to steal the magic of a werewolf.  That’s pretty much it. Oh, there are some details. The quest is instigated by a queen (Amara Okerke) who desires the power in order to be worthy of her lover. There’s a religious leader (Fraser James), who is secretly plotting the queen’s overthrow. And there’s a zealot (Dierdre Mullins) who will stop at nothing to destroy the heretic witch. It’s all pretty basic and uninspired – the kind of basic tripe that even a fifth-grader will understand.

For unknown reasons, Anderson opted to incorporate just enough violence to tip the movie from PG-13 territory into the realm of R. So it’s violent… but not excessively so. And there’s some gore…but not that much. The film’s seeming reticence to abandon itself to the excesses available with the more restrictive classification makes no sense. I’ve never previously thought of Anderson as being particularly puritanical and this isn’t the best time for such tendencies to surface.

The marketing campaign for the movie, desperate to find some way to interest viewers into seeing something that would have seemed passe a decade ago, emphasizes the George R.R. Martin connection. And, while it’s true that Martin wrote the short story that forms the foundation of In the Lost Lands, this is much more Anderson than Martin. And, to the extent that elements of Martin’s writing can be found in the movie, they are not representative of his best work. The political and religious aspects feel like faint and distant echoes of elements Martin explored at much greater depth in A Song of Ice and Fire; here, they’re window dressing.

The film’s two stars are no strangers to genre work. Dave Bautista is in paycheck-collection mode, abandoning even a vague attempt at pretending to be engaged by the story. Milla Jovovich is somewhat better, possibly because it wouldn’t be good for her domestic harmony to turn in a lifeless performance for her husband (Anderson). The special effects constantly trump the humans – the closer In the Lost Lands gets to pure animation, the more watchable it becomes. The best scene features a runaway locomotive flying off the edge of a destroyed track and into an abyss. Human involvement is minimal – it was primarily composed on a computer.

Anderson proves incapable of generating even a modicum of tension. That’s partly because we don’t care at all about the characters and partly because we’ve seen all this stuff before, although possibly with a more vibrant color palette. The screenplay fails to provide any reason to care about the characters or their circumstances, so we sit in a theater seat, trying not to be hypnotized by all the flashes of light in the muddled brown-and-white environment or lulled to sleep by the inane babbling that passes for dialogue.

Review: "In the Lost Lands" (Germany/Canada/USA, 2025)