Kritiken

It’s refreshing and more than a little thrilling to see a director commit to such silliness in an era when blockbuster filmmaking relies largely on pages of expository dialogue, visual callbacks and empty irony disguised as wit. Here, we instead receive an eye-popping display of Gothic and futuristic production and costume design.

Anderson has never lacked in visual flair or stylistic idiosyncrasy, and that’s what completely sets In the Lost Lands apart from its antecedents. As with the director’s previous movies, this latest project is full of ostentatiously symmetrical compositions, egregious uses of speed-ramping and slow motion, endless iconic posing from Jovovich, and outlandish CGI monsters... The perceived charm of all of all this is of course subject to individual mileage, but for the heads in the know, In the Lost Lands is an absolute delight.

Despite the mash-up of genres and themes, the overall movie comes across as a lot less complicated... Ultimately, the threadbare quality of Constantin Werner’s screenplay cannot be smoothed over with gobs of CGI effects (impressive as some of these sequences look) and the star power of Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista.

In The Lost Lands feels superficial even by Anderson’s standards, leaning a little too heavily into his predilection for pastiche... The set pieces—usually one of Anderson’s strengths—are mostly underwhelming and repetitive... Throughout, one is continually reminded of other, better movies—not least of all, the kind of eminently watchable genre films Anderson was producing at his peak.

In the Lost Lands looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It has some familiar features of the postapocalyptic... crossed with elements of medieval fantasy... And while that combination is intriguing, what’s truly striking about the film is the storybook quality that Anderson has given every single scene... The whole thing is marvelously unreal. You might find yourself wanting to lose yourself in it.

“In the Lost Lands” is Anderson’s least imaginative film... The cheap effects used for the film’s many firefights and explosions look like a flurry of pixels. The editing attempts to hide these shortcomings, cutting around the action to the point of being incomprehensible. And maybe that’s for the best.

The joy is all in [the film's] inspired, sensuous imagery, fantastical and dreamlike. The action scene as poetry, endless poetry in and for a hopeless world.

The dreary cutaways to backroom politicking only emphasize that In the Lost Lands is better served when guided by a tenacious trashmonger’s imagination. At its simplest, the story frees Anderson to whip up some arresting imagery.

This eyesore of a film is so ugly and confusing to look at it that its fable-like story — incoherent even by Anderson’s standards — never has even the slightest chance to overcome how difficult it is to see, as the glaringly digital locations that bring its post-apocalyptic future “to life” are far too garish to parse at a glance.

But for anyone not predisposed to enjoy this sort of thing, the film is a long haul, suffering from a simultaneously overstuffed and paper-thin narrative that, toward the conclusion, features enough revelations and plot twists to make Agatha Christie throw up her hands.

Even the most ardent defender of Paul W.S. Anderson’s work might think In the Lost Lands is the kind of mess that proves the Resident Evil director’s detractors right. It’s not just a barely comprehensible failure on its own, but an adaptation that takes a character-based drama and turns it into an ugly action flick.

All the dramatic heaviness of “In the Lost Lands” weighs [Paul W.S. Anderson] down here, waging war against his obvious attempts to make the movie fun — attempts which in turn rob the material of its poetry.