A few thoughts about The Lost City of Z (2016)

Unlike a lot of critics, I find little to enjoy about James Gray’s adaptation of David Grann’s excellent book about Edwardian explorer Percy Fawcett. In part, my intense dislike of the film is certainly caused by the simplistic way Gray’s script turns the rather complicated Fawcett into a simplistic type we know and hate from a lot of bio pics: the guy who is right about stuff even though most of the world disagrees. The film’s approach to Fawcett’s actual ideas manages to turn a man trapped between progressive (for his time) ideas that came to him through practical experience, typical reactionary thought of his time of the dying British Empire, and romantic craziness into your typical anti-racist 2017 era liberal, which is certainly easier for a (stupid) audience to identify with but is also neither believable, nor does it get at the internal inconsistencies that make Fawcett so interesting and his story – apart from all fantastic adventurous thought and obsession and tragedy – so human.

The film’s Fawcett – as rather indifferently performed by Charlie Hunnam - is a cardboard character, and his ideas are cardboard character ideas without nuance, doubt, and the thing we all as humans share (yes, I mean myself, and you, and so on): being wrong.

All this, I still could accept, if the bad adaptation of a good book would at least work as a decent adventure movie. For that, unfortunately, the film’s pacing is way too leaden and there are too many scenes of Fawcett debating the theories that only vaguely resemble those he actually held, full of the sort of “intelligent people are talking” dialogue screenwriters get up to when they don’t trust their audience’s intelligence to actually understand or be interested in the ideas discussed. I’m not a friend of the phrase “dumbing it down”, but that’s exactly what Gray’s film does to Grann’s book; and it doesn’t even do it well or with charm.


In this context, it will come as no surprise that the dangers Fawcett faces in the rainforest are rather more appetizing than a lot of those the actual Fawcett’s expeditions suffered from. The real life body horror element isn’t completely absent in the movie, but the film’s still pretty squeamish when it comes to the icky details and really rather prefers dangers out of traditional adventure movies – it’s not terribly adequate at making these exciting either, though.