Runtime: 141 minutes
Directed by: James Gray
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley
From: Several different production companies
This movie represents several of my tropes. I don't mean in the sort of motion picture it is. Rather, it is such things as “Wanting to see a movie but literally putting it off for years” and “struggling to select what to see for the day/evening/whenever” (a big problem for me as of late)... not to mention other common issues such as “purchasing something on physical media and waiting ages to actually watch it.” To be honest, the not always glowing reviews have been in the back of my mind for this effort ever since it was released in America four springs ago. That shouldn't have deterred me considering that I've literally known of Percy Fawcett since I was a kid, when I read about his disappearance in a book. As that detail is mentioned in every plot synopsis for the film... on the surface it sounds like quite the cinematic tale: “A famous British explorer believes there's a magical hidden city in the jungles of the Amazon... and disappears while looking for this El Dorado of the past.”
In general, from what I've read and heard the movie is relatively accurate to the basics of the actual story. Fawcett was in the British Army and was a surveyor for the Royal Geographic Society. He was asked to survey lands in South America that were not known to the white man. He became convinced there was a lost city built by the ancient natives long ago, which he referred to as Z... or “Zed” if you're British. The dumb white people of the time in general scoffed at the idea of those “primitives” having an advanced society in the past. He became obsessed with finding it, to the detriment of everything else... including the wife and kids he had at home. In 1925 he tried one last time to find it (with his son and someone else... it wasn't just him and son like the movie claimed) only for them to go missing.
It does have to be clarified that of course the movie paints Fawcett in a more flattering light than what actually occurred. His views on “the natives” were more complicated, for example. He still referred to them in a rather condescending way, even comparing them to apes and presuming that their advanced societies must have had something to do with the Europeans of the past. There's also controversy over how exaggerated the claims made about Fawcett's talents were in the movie and the book of the same name this is based on. The explorations he made on his own to find Z turned into disasters (it wasn't just the final one; the movie glossed over the others) and apparently he did not treat very well those that were on those treks with him. Perhaps he isn't as legendary a British explorer as recent media has led people to believe. There are a number of possibilities as to the ultimate fate of that small party; “It wasn't pleasant and was also not so glamorous” is the likely result no matter what it was specifically.
No matter the truth, it wasn't a movie I loved (at times the pacing was slow even for my tastes) but it was still pretty good and at times like adventure pictures of old. Charlie Hunnam was fine in the lead role-at least he was better than in Pacific Rim; the cast as a whole was fine but Robert Pattinson was the standout. What different roles he had in this, The Lighthouse and Good Time he's impressed in all three; I should seek out more, and I don't mean those awful sparkly vampire movies... at least he went far away from that phenomenon as soon as he could and had the talent to appear in the sort of films that we in general happen to dig. Visually the movie always looked marvelous, whether in South America-Colombia substituting for the jungles of other countries-or in the UK, or the World War I battle scene... it was thus nice being able to check out the 4K stream on Amazon.
The only James Gray pictures I've seen are this and Ad Astra; even if film fans disagree on the quality of his work (let alone the general public) one of the thousand or so ideas for what to watch in the future is “more of what this director has made.”
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