In the Lost Lands: Not even empty symbolism
Dragonsphere Report
George RR Marin is in collect a paycheck mode and Paul W.S. Anderson is in Paul W.S Anderson mode in what has to be the most complete and brazen use of green screens since the Star Wars prequels. Milla Jovovich returns as another female badass named Alice in a film which only wishes it had the redeeming fun factor of a Resident Evil movie.
Whatever happened to Paul W.S. Anderson between Shopping and In the Lost Lands was the equivalent of a cobalt bomb for his soul. Only Zack Snyder consistently produces more flat and semiotically dead works. In a movie which is set in a fantasy universe and hence ostensibly entirely about semiotics, this is noteworthy. It produces something that, if it were 20% less coherent, would read as merely alien and impenetrable and hence loop around, albeit unintentionally, to having some sort of artistic value. Both Snyder and Anderson seem to have a syndrome, of knowing that symbols are meant to be met halfway, but not knowing that this still means the story has to keep up it’s end of the bargain. This doesn’t even feel like a placeholder script, because a placeholder script would have undeveloped ideas in it. It genuinely feels like no ideas could ever have grown here.
The story is simple: a witch who grants wishes grants too many wishes, then befriends a mercenary as part of a gambit in order to badly fulfill the wishes. This requires a climactic final betrayal on her part, which she doesn’t even have the honesty to admit, instead framing it as if she is the one betrayed. Due to a checkov’s gun/deus ex machina the man she betrays survives and they become an item. Also he is a werewolf.
There was one good visual idea in the movie. After killing all of the man’s friends, a zealot woman stands sneering as he unloads round after round from a rifle towards her, hitting instead an endless stream of followers who act as human shields. This is perhaps the only idea in the movie and it connects to nothing else.
Despite that I had fun. It is dopamine releasing to see Milla Jovovich in action scenes, and Dave Bautista was plausible.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report