{"id":6123,"date":"2017-11-06T09:42:39","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T14:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6123"},"modified":"2017-11-06T16:54:15","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T21:54:15","slug":"the-lost-city-of-z","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/06\/the-lost-city-of-z\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost City of Z."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lost City of Z<\/em> is based on David Grann\u2019s bestselling 2009 book about Percy Fawcett<\/a>, a renowned British explorer who disappeared in central South America sometime after 1925 during an expedition to find the remnants of a long-gone advanced civilization there. Starring Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, the movie hews relatively closely to Fawcett\u2019s true story and offers many compelling scenes from his first two expeditions to the Amazon basin, but doesn\u2019t give us enough understanding of its protagonist to create real interest in the character\u2019s fate. The movie is available free on amazon prime<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hunnam plays the dashing hero, complete with a Poirot-esque mustache, whom we first meet as the Royal Geographical Society asks him to journey to the center of the continent to help map the disputed border between Brazil and Bolivia. (If you don\u2019t know much South American history, here\u2019s a good summary: Bolivia kept picking border fights with its neighbors and lost every one of them, including one fight that cost the country its narrow coastline on the Pacific.) He\u2019s reluctant to take on a non-military mission, but does so in the hopes of restoring his family name – the film has his father as a degenerate gambler and drunk, although that may be fictional – and sets off with the help of Coatson (Robert Pattinson) to chart the border and eventually find the source of a major river. The journey is perilous, many redshirts don\u2019t survive it, and even the men who do are in sad shape when they reach the river\u2019s source, but they do and return home to a heroes\u2019 welcome. That spurs another expedition that doesn\u2019t go quite so well, but the two combine to convince Fawcett of the existence of the city of Z, and he yearns for one more chance to go discover it.<\/p>\n

Hunnam himself is a charmless man in the lead role – he probably knows his claret from his Beaujolais – and the movie truly suffers for it. Benedict Cumberbatch was originally attached to the project, and his charisma is sorely missed here. Pattinson steals every scene he\u2019s in with Hunnam, thoroughly inhabiting his character\u2019s rakishness and loyalty right to the very end of his arc. Sienna Miller is similarly blank in her role as Fawcett\u2019s wife, looking pretty but feeling one-dimensional – she\u2019s the suffering wife, no, she\u2019s the loyal little lady, no, she\u2019s the proud wife and mother, as if we see three different women at different points in the film. <\/p>\n

The scenery, however, is stunning – it is an expertly made film, with gorgeous, expansive shots of the jungle and the rivers. There\u2019s real action and suspense when they\u2019re on expeditions, and the scenes in London feel more like interstitials. There\u2019s a short subplot, based on actual events, around another explorer who comes on their second mission and is badly injured, giving Fawcett a real antagonist but also ending abruptly (as it did in real life). When Fawcett came home, as a father and husband I couldn\u2019t understand his willingness to leave his wife and children, but as a viewer I wanted him to get back to the jungle and do stuff.<\/p>\n

Of course, the movie suffers from the unknown: Theories abound as to what happened to Fawcett and his son on their final mission, and Grann used a legend he heard from one of the native tribes in the region to craft a new hypothesis, but we just don\u2019t know. The script doesn\u2019t deal well with the uncertainty, giving us an ambiguous egress for the two men and a sentimental ending for Fawcett\u2019s wife. Perhaps fabricating a specific outcome would have gone too far, but charting their progress and disappearance from London may have served the film better.<\/p>\n

This is a very solid, competently made film that just lacks the extra level of emotion that would connect viewers to the story or the main character. We learn so little of Fawcett\u2019s background that his wanderlust is a bit hard to grasp, and Hunnam plays him so clinically that, if I didn\u2019t know better, I\u2019d think he was an American actor trying too hard to nail the upper class British accent. (Hunnam is English.) More prologue might have helped – or less, if perhaps we\u2019d started in the Amazon and skipped some of the home scenes. It feels very much like a movie that could have been great, but isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lost City of Z is based on David Grann\u2019s bestselling 2009 book about Percy Fawcett, a renowned British explorer who disappeared in central South America sometime after 1925 during an expedition to find the remnants of a long-gone advanced civilization there. Starring Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, the movie hews relatively closely to Fawcett\u2019s true […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[925,25,215],"class_list":["post-6123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-movies","tag-adaptations","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6123"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6126,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123\/revisions\/6126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}