Jovovich and Bautista drown in a sepia slurry of soupy CGI.
If your idea of fantasy is watching actors march grimly across vast acres of greenscreen replaced with desaturated CG wastelands while muttering dialogue that sounds like it was pieced together from early Rebel Moon drafts, In The Lost Lands might just be your Citizen Kane. But for everyone else, it’s more a warning klaxon than a waypoint—a cautionary tale of what happens when genre ambition meets auteur hubris and collapses under the weight of borrowed aesthetic and vacuous world-building.
In the last human settlement on a post-apocalyptic scorched Earth, sorceress Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) is approached by the consort of the Overlord, seeking the power to shapeshift and escape her ailing tyrant husband. To complete the task, Alys must travel into the Lost Lands, a desolate region feared for its lethal inhabitants, joined on her quest by gun-for-hire Boyce (Dave Bautista), and pursued by the fanatical Enforcer and her acolytes.
In The Lost Lands is based on a short story written by George R R Martin – presumably the same George R R Martin who signed off on Game Of Thrones season 8. You can see the shape of his usual obsessions here: non-specific, ill-defined magic and mysticism, sex, betrayal, courtly intrigue and brutal, often arbitrary violence. Unfortunately, in Paul W S Anderson’s hands, the result is an ouroboros of grimdark nonsense: a film so determined to look mythic, it forgets to say or mean anything. It’s drenched in the grunge-filter lens and muddy CGI that makes you wonder if anything you see on screen has any physical presence whatsoever, including the cast. Everything looks glossily, artificial, somewhere between 300’s stylised crepuscular tone and deleted digital backgrounds from a Zack Snyder sizzle reel.
Structured like a jumbled series of half-remembered stress dreams, trapped in syrupy amber slow motion, In The Lost Lands buries any ideas and its cast beneath a slurry of special effects and no matter how formidable a witch she is, Jovovich’s Gray Alys is powerless to bring any kind of life to the movie, slouching through each sequence with the energy of someone who’s just here because her husband asked her to help out at work. Even Dave Bautista – who attempts to brute-force charisma into the void – seems to give up after the first few minutes of screen time and resigns himself to just getting through the job and picking up the paycheque.
It’s a film almost obsessed with import, where every utterance strains under the weight of a faux-epic cadence, yet it’s so desperately superficial and empty it feels flatter than seems two dimensionally possible. You quickly tire of the off-the-shelf digital vistas, each one less convincing than the last, with landscapes that seem to actively repel both the characters and the audience. These aren’t places you can believe in or fear, so generically artificial they may as well come with watermark still embedded. Devoid of a coherent narrative or engaged performances, Anderson bets on the mere appearance of scale to substitute for substance and loses heavily.
The tragedy here isn’t that In The Lost Lands is bad – and it is atrocious. It’s that it genuinely seems to believe on some level its meaningful and epic, but it can’t even summon up the occasionally fleeting moments of cool that even Zack Snyder occasionally stumbled across. It’s dreary in every way that a film can be dreary and the only barren wasteland that it succeeds in evoking is the one it leaves in its audience’s memory.
