
In The Lost Lands is directed by Paul W.S. Anderson director of the Resident Evil film franchise (2002-2016), Event Horizon (1997), Mortal Kombat (1995), Alien Vs. Predator (2004), Pompeii (2014), Monster Hunter (2020) and a few others.
Paul W.S. Anderson is back and with his same old shtick, a terrible post-apocalyptic movie starring his wife Milla Jovovich. He’s done this multiple times with the Resident Evil films and Monster Hunter (2020) in particular. In The Lost Lands somehow ends up being far worse than any of the movies mentioned, mainly due to the movie having no personality behind it at all and being a complete and total mess.
The performances here are mostly terrible, occasionally Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista will have moments that attempt to elevate the material. But unfortunately those moments are far and few between to even really matter in the end, the acting results in some incredibly awful dialogue that have the energy of NPCs from an early 2000s video game. The writing is incredibly poor, we don’t learn anything of note about the characters at all outside of cliched elements that you have come to expect. The movie’s world is about as bland as you can get from these post-apocalyptic movies, there’s very little atmosphere that drives the viewer into the movie. It’s all incredibly stale and lacking in personality, it feels a lot like any of Anderson’s previous movies just somehow worse.
The movie itself right from the start is a jumbled mess, within the first few minutes it feels like the movie is throwing you in the middle of the second act. The viewer feels like they are missing a lot of context or wondering if there were supposed to be extra scenes here but were cut for some reason (I had these same thoughts as well.) This is exactly the sort of mess you would expect from one of these poorly rated action films that came out in the 2000s, you know the ones with barely a coherent plot, choppy editing and laughably bad filmmaking wise? Whereas those movies at least have some charm and could be laughed at, In The Lost Lands does not have any of the charm at all and only has a few moments of unintentional humor It’s a dull and uninteresting mess that does not have any sort of fun with itself at all.
The movie itself is also incredibly ugly to look at, I get what they were going for here but none of it works. The desaturated colors are not appealing here at all and feel more like they are trying to replicate Sucker Punch (2011) only that while the movie itself wasn’t exactly great at least stylistically it made sense as to why it looked like that (and had story reasons as well.) In The Lost Lands just feels like it saw what Zack Snyder did and then tried to replicate without thinking as to why it for the most part worked for Snyder.
There really is not much more to be said here, In The Lost Lands is yet another terrible movie from Anderson. As I said before it’s almost identical to his other films, even if you are someone who enjoyed his Resident Evil films you will not get anything out of this one.
In The Lost Lands is available on all VOD platforms.
1/10 F








