Every few years, a movie comes along so eager to don the tarnished crown of “epic fantasy”—to conquer, to astonish, to graft itself onto the sagging limbs of a post-Lord of the Rings landscape—that it forgets the very sinews that hold stories together. Into the Lost Lands, Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest incursion into genre upheaval, is not so much an adventure as it is a protracted reminder that the land of cinema has indeed been lost.
There’s a certain lunacy in watching Anderson chase the ghosts of other franchises—Van Helsing, Mad Max, and a half-dozen others—hurling their scattered remnants at the wall in the desperate hope that something will stick. What emerges is that peculiarly modern form of junk entertainment: the cinematic blender set to “purée,” every influence whirring into a pale mush. Watching it, I half expected an Avengers cameo or a stray Xenomorph to sidle up beside Milla Jovovich’s witch, as if to rescue the picture from its own entropy. But alas, not even serendipitous mishaps could save this script from its designate: oblivion.
Jovovich, who has forged a career out of gamely marching through rain-soaked apocalypses, glares and glowers as Gray Alys, a witch allegedly so formidable that the plot’s survival depends on her. Dave Bautista’s Boyce (imagine a gladiator grown weary of his own one-liners) is reduced to a courier, dragging both protagonist and audience from one CGI outcropping to the next. Jovovich’s brand of stoic charisma is present, as is Bautista’s muted brawn; but here, their talents are deployed in the manner of medieval condiments—shaken generously over dried-out fare in the hope that flavor will emerge. It doesn’t.
There may have been, at some point in the script’s gestation, ambitions toward grandeur. Anderson gestures repeatedly toward themes of power, rebellion, and the shifting forms of monstrosity—a werewolf here, a mutinous queen there. But these are little more than echoes, faint traces of meaning evaporating into a dialogue so cumbersome and illogical that it achieves a kind of anti-poetry. When the intended profundity scans like the transcript from a Zoom call interrupted by clumsy AI-generated banter, you begin to suspect the writers are having a private joke. The result is a labyrinth of plot twists and “epic” revelations that feel less like narrative development and more like narrative vandalism.
Visuals, so often Anderson’s lifeboat, collapse under the weight of their own garishness. The CGI would look dated beside late-’90s video games, while the environments—engineered, we’re told, with the Unreal Engine—never rise above the unreal. Rather than immersing, they repel: a procession of screensaver wastelands, haunted by actors in costumes salvaged from a long-forgotten Renaissance Fair. Characters brandish weapons and incant magical phrases in front of digital backdrops about as convincing as a department store window. You half expect someone to trip over a rendering glitch and disappear entirely.
Is Into the Lost Lands so-bad-it’s-good? For that, a certain careless exuberance is required—a wink at the audience, a delighted wallowing in trash. But Anderson, forever the earnest showman, plows heedless ahead. The result is less midnight-movie camp and more an expensive shrug: a film elbowing you in the ribs and asking you to laugh at its seriousness, while failing to realize that the joke is on itself. The slow-mo pratfalls and self-important pronouncements draw snickers where awe was intended, leaving us stranded somewhere between farce and tedium.
If cinema is, at its best, a dream projected in light, Into the Lost Lands is what happens when the dreamer nods off midsentence. In its ruins, Jovovich, Bautista, and a supporting cast of lost souls do what they can, but are ultimately overrun by the sheer incoherence of the proceedings. The movie is a lesson—one easily learned, but repeatedly ignored—that a treasury of visual effects means nothing without the currency of imagination.
In the end, what’s left? A cautionary tale for casting directors, an accidental comedy for masochistic viewers, a monument to the perils of assuming “epic” is a synonym for “loud” and “confused.” As I stumbled blinking from Anderson’s wasteland, I found myself recalling the words of Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this?” Lost lands, indeed. Sometimes it’s better not to return.
