The Lost City of Z

I really enjoyed this movie. I didn't know anything about the true story and had not read the book it is based on, so I don't have any complaints about accuracy and I didn't compare it to the book. So from the point of view of a simple movie watcher, it was a great movie.

The cast, locations, costumes, sets etc. were all great. The story was very enjoyable and it seemed quite authentic to its time period. With a running time of 2hr 20mins it could have ran the risk of being long-winded and boring, but it kept my interest the entire time. I didn't think it felt like a long movie. I'd only seen Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson in a couple of movies before this, but I think they played quite different roles to usual and were both very good, as was the entire cast. If you're not going to get hung up on historical accuracy and just watch it as a movie than I highly recommend giving it a chance.

I'm sad to say that I was disappointed by this film in almost every aspect. It seems to me that the biggest problem it has is the pacing. For a two and a half hour long film, pacing is important to keep the viewers engaged and this movie just gets it completely wrong. It feels like three movies clumsily stuffed into one, and as if that wasn't enough, it adds a bunch of utterly irrelevant scenes which could have easily been cut out of the movie entirely. I, for one, was expecting to see at least some beautiful cinematography, but the movie fails to deliver even in the aesthetic aspect. I was also expecting to see a lot more of the actual journey to the Amazon, but instead we got scene after boring scene in England, where nothing of importance really happens. After about an hour and a half I was left wondering how so many critics found this movie watchable, desperately trying not to fall asleep. To make matters even worse, Charlie Hunnam delivers an awful performance and makes for an overall uninteresting lead. Surprisingly, the only performance worth watching in this film was, out of all people, Robert Pattinson. I'm certainly glad he's moving away from his Twilight years and I hope to see him in more roles like this one in the future. Overall, this was a forgettable, boring, mess of a movie.

Having not known quite what to expect from this movie - had it been made anytime before 30 years ago that might have been easier - I actually found it fascinating, and it held my attention the whole way through. Based on a true story, it paints a vivid picture not only of the Amazonian region which Percy Fawcett and his men set out to explore, but also of the Western society they came from, but in a fairly balanced way - this didn't feel like another case of 'weren't Western white people before 1980 all absolutely dreadful' but rather a portrayal of a society with its own beliefs and attitudes (as all societies have) faced with the prospect of discovering another, much older, civilisation.

This wouldn't be a film for fans of action movies as such. Instead it offers a fascinating study of place, society and the often slow and hazardous process of discovery and its effect on the people - all of the people - involved.

Screenplay jumps from one segment of Fawcett's life to another, without a lot of connexion.

I didn't really object to this film's two and a half hours long run time, I just wish more time would have been spent in the jungles, searching for the lost city, because when they're in the jungles, the film works well, as unseen natives launch arrows at them, and their rocky trip through some rapids, and the film is well worth watching for those scenes. More of the screenstory should have dealt with this, as well as the jungle natives themselves.

Instead, the first fifteen minutes are unrelated hunting stories, and it later veers off into feminist ramblings for one lengthy scene, and a completely out of place, and needless sequence on a WWI battlefield, which seems to occupy about fifteen minutes of the run time as well, and for what purpose? It seems like the filmmakers had abandoned the premise of searching for a lost city, and padded the plot out with these scenes, and as a result, the search for a lost city only makes up about 40% of the movie.

There are occasional questions of whether the explorers are more savage than the natives, but even that doesn't seem to go anywhere, as the film will quickly go off into a different direction.

This is (or should be, anyway) a film where its setting and location should become a character in its own right (like the jungles in Predator, or the building in Die Hard, or the hotel in The Shining) but we see so little of it that it could just simply be an overgrown section of land in Hawai'i.

An American biographical adventure; A story about a man who journeys into the Amazon at the dawn of the 20th century aiming for a city he called 'Z' and discovers evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization that may have once inhabited the region. It's a film that resembles, in style, exploration film epics of the mid-20th century. Charlie Hunnam gives a well measured performance as the British geographer, Army Major, and explorer Percy Fawcett. The story centres on passion and determination and obsession and escape but also the losses suffered by leaving home - his growing family and dutiful wife - in service of fantastical dreams. It is a biopic by numbers of a troublesome topic because Fawcett's history has many critics. Nonetheless, it is a stately adventure despite the slow pacing.