There was a brief moment — right around the release of “Resident Evil: Retribution,” and the discourse about “vulgar auteurism” that peaked along with it — when it seemed as though Paul W.S. Anderson had found a way to weaponize the nü-metal nothingness of his blockbuster slop into a strange kind of somethingness that nobody else could make. If the first three movies in the survival-horror franchise had systematically drained Capcom’s source material of everything that made the “Resident Evil” video games scary, fun, or at all interesting for any other reason, the fourth one made it seem as though Anderson had tunneled a hole straight through the bottom of the lowest common denominator until he burst through the top of a different artistic stratum altogether; one less concerned with plot or purpose than with the orgiastic fervor of creating recursive spectacle at the end of history.
The sequence where Anderson’s wife and muse Milla Jovovich shoots her way through a simulation of the previous film in slow-motion was enough of an ouroboros, to borrow a word that most of my generation learned from “Resident Evil 4,” to suggest that Anderson’s unaging aesthetic — forever stuck in what 13-year-old boys thought was cool in 1997 — might be enough to save him from the tedium of what 13-year-old boys thought was cool in 2012. While the rest of the film industry was going all-in on capeshit, the “Mortal Kombat” director was sticking to his guns. By doubling down on the braindead gaminess that had made him such a pariah in the past, Anderson was able to stand out from the present.
Thirteen years later, he still hasn’t moved forward.
Anderson’s idea of video game cinema is the same in 2025 as it was in 2012 (and in 1995 before that), despite the fact that video games themselves have evolved too far to fit under any coherent Umbrella; even the “Resident Evil” series has been rendered unrecognizable from its origins. Anderson used to be mocked for making movies that unapologetically felt like video games, but at a time when any random screenshot from the latest “Monster Hunter” sequel boasts more life and detail than the sum total of the film adaptation that Anderson made from it in 2020, it’s starting to seem like he might not even be able to do that anymore.
In that light, his decision to shoot “In the Lost Lands” with the Unreal Engine — to build the world for his latest fantasy adventure vehicle with the same tools that people use to create their own content in “Fortnite” — feels like a cross between a hail Mary and a cry for help. As someone who’s been seated for Anderson’s work since I was a kid, and who still maintains that “Event Horizon” is a singular piece of interstellar schlock, I couldn’t help but hope that making a literal video game movie would drive the director so deep into the heart of his style that it would force him to rediscover why even his most smooth-brained stuff used to feel sui generis in its stupidity.
My hope was sadly misplaced. Adapted from George R.R. Martin’s 1982 short story of the same name, “In the Lost Lands” is unmistakably a Paul W.S. Anderson picture in some key respects (i.e. it opens with a sequence where Jovovich uses impractical witch magic to kill some bad guys in fetishistic slow-motion against the backdrop of an industrial wasteland), but the same video game aesthetic that facilitated his earlier B-movies has otherwise entombed this new one in a generic mess of C++.
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. Using the Unreal Engine to create real-time environments is supposed to make the actors seem more fully integrated with their surroundings than they might if shot against a green screen, but all of the spaces in this nuclear Western, from the scorched expanses of the Fire Fields to the iron confines of the City Under the Mountain where the action begins, boast the incredible seamlessness of a Zoom backdrop. Even Jovovich’s tattoos seem to float around her face. “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” came out 21 years ago, and yet it feels like we’ve somehow managed to take 10 steps back.
It doesn’t help that the Lost Lands themselves are as precise and discerning as the atomic bombs that created them — if you asked ChatGPT to create “’Mad Max,’ but much emptier and 9,000 percent more orange,” this hellscape is exactly what it would spit out. And the people who live in it don’t fare any better. The characters in Constantin Werner’s script talk almost exclusively in exposition, and yet it was only towards the very end of the movie that I began to understand who some of them were — or what any of them wanted. Word to the wise: When a film begins with someone looking down the lens of the camera and offering the audience to tell them a story “if [they’ve] got the time and the stomach for it,” it’s always a much bigger “if” than you’d think.
Here’s what I was able to piece together: The world has gone to shit, and the only survivors live in a city ruled by a religious cult whose sole belief is that hanging people is fun. The haunted witch Gray Alys (Jovovich) disagrees, and uses her mind powers to slip the noose before it’s too late — much to the chagrin of the cult’s Patriarch (Fraser James) and his deadly Enforcer (Arly Jover). But real control of the city lies in the hands of a dying Overlord, whose beautiful young queen Melange (Amara Okereke) wants to be transformed into a werewolf so that she can be with her secret lover. How would that help? Please save your questions for the end, or preferably never.
What matters is that Alys has been cursed to grant anything wished of her, which is why — when the queen visits the witch in the big dark room where she inexplicably waits for people to come make wishes — Alys is powerless to deny Melange’s request to become a werewolf. Just as she’s powerless to deny the hunky captain of the Overlord’s army (Simon Lööf) when he sneaks in to wish that Melange doesn’t turn into a werewolf. What’s a witch to do! Alys’ plan: Enlist the rugged gunslinger Boyce (Dave Bautista, doing his thing) to accompany her to the mythic domain of Skull River with his double-barreled snake gun, where they will slay the scary werewolf who lives there, harness its power, and… figure out the rest when they get there. And just to be clear, the gun doesn’t fire snakes. It doesn’t fire anything. A pair of snakes just sort of live on it? And maybe they’re just an illusion?
Anyway, I suppose that has the makings of the epic quest that Bautista promises us in the movie’s opening address, but the setup is so clumsy — and the spatial geography so garbled — that the only sense of direction is derived from Anderson’s use of a “Lord of the Rings”-like map to chart his characters’ progress (a great device that I wish all movies used, regardless of genre). Of course, the actual “Lord of the Rings” movies didn’t need to rely on such things, as their locations were vivid and visually distinct from one another, but “In the Lost Lands” doesn’t have the same luxury; Anderson has cited Hieronymous Bosch as a major inspiration, but Mark Rothko would be a more credible point of reference.
“In the Lost Lands” is at its worst during the early stretches of Alys and Boyce’s journey, when the movie feigns at pathos as it lays the groundwork for a love story between its heroes, and Bautista is forced to grumble things like “All men are beasts, but not all men are monsters.” Backstory is a kiss of death to a movie whose actual story is already struggling to make any sense, and where Martin’s affinity for ambient lore helped “Elden Ring” reach deeper than any of FromSoftware’s previous games, the author’s signature matrix of criss-crossing allegiances and miles-deep mythos is strangely less suited to an 100-minute Western that spends half of its running time in slow-motion.
All the better to feast your eyes upon the sand-blasted sterility of the film’s visuals, I suppose, which are only slightly enlivened by the action setpieces that Anderson stages against them. One high-octane chase involving an airborne school bus has the aftertaste of something that might have been fun in a different film, but the clarity that Anderson typically brings to his stunts is soured by his struggle to situate them in the context of Alys and Boyce’s journey to the werewolf’s domain of Skull River (spoiler alert: It’s a vague orange void with some skulls on the ground).
Why is the Enforcer so hellbent on killing Alys anyway? Is she just resentful of the fact that Alys has the power to change her appearance at will? So much as there’s any sort of coherent throughline in this feature-length cut-scene of a movie, it’s that you ought to be careful what you wish for, as the power to reshape the world has a tendency to blow up in your face. It’s a moral that Anderson learns the hard way; after decades of trying to thread the needle between movies and video games, he finally got his hands on the tools required to fulfill that dream. In doing so, his films have lost the last trace of whatever made them worth playing in the first place.
Grade: D
Vertical Entertainment will release “In the Lost Lands” in theaters on Friday, March 7.
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