It says a lot about the human condition, or at least the human ego, that the majority of our post-apocalyptic stories are about people who survive the apocalypse and become way more kickass. As opposed to, say, stories about the cockroaches who live on after we destroy ourselves, which is probably a more plausible scenario. The apocalypse looks like a pretty bad time in movies like “Fury Road” and “The Matrix” but the post-apocalypse is going to be pretty darned cool if those movies are any indication. At least that’s what Hollywood is selling.
Paul W.S. Anderson is no stranger to the post-apocalyptic subgenre. He’s made multiple “Resident Evil” films set in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. Those films starred action hero Milla Jovovich as a superpowered post-apocalyptic warrior named Alice. But that was then and this is now, so he’s mixing it up a little with “In the Lost Lands.” His new film stars Milla Jovovich as a superpowered post-apocalyptic warrior named Gray Alys. Which is a lot like Christopher Nolan casting Christian Bale as an unrelated billionaire vigilante ninja in Gotham City named Gray Batmyn. It’s totally different, you guys, we swear.
“In the Lost Lands” is, like pretty much all of Paul W.S. Anderson’s movies, absurd in every conceivable way. It’s got slow-motion fight scenes that make no sense and look like heavy metal perfume commercials. It’s got dialogue that cannot be believed, so the actors say it ponderously and slow as if that makes it Shakespeare. It’s utter nonsense from start to finish, a style exercise directed by a filmmaker whose style is outlandish to an adorable degree. It’s easy to scoff at the W.S. Andersonian oeuvre but his films are mercifully devoid of self-importance. He knows this stuff is silly. He just thinks silly is cool.
Unfortunately, silly can sometimes be boring. “In the Lost Lands” is a drab affair in spite of itself, especially from the director who gave you Kit Harrington sensually snapping a horse’s neck with his bare hands while making goo-goo eyes at Emily Browning in “Pompeii.” It’s a grim slog through the wastelands of human civilization, which makes a big deal about the generic parts and glosses over all the thrilling weirdness. There are nuclear waste skeleton monsters and super werewolves, but instead we’re stuck with royal intrigue and sullen warriors falling sullenly for each other and imagery so orange you’d swear they used the Sunny Delight filter.
“In the Lost Lands” begins with Gray Alys in the midst of her public execution, because she’s a powerful witch and a big religious cult — whose top enforcer looks like a Vash the Stampede cosplayer — does not like that very much. Gray Alys escapes and returns to her house, a place everyone knows about, so you would think the bad guys would have sent some goons over to apprehend her all over again but no, they do not think to do that until the A-plot has already kicked in and she’s out adventuring.
Gray Alys is not just a badass. She also grants wishes. In fact, she’s required — never mind how or why — to grant any wish anyone asks of her. So when Queen Melange (Amara Okereke, “The Morning After”) says she would really like to be a werewolf, Gray Alys has to make it so. Except she’s not a fairy godmother. She has no magic wand and she can not will any wishes into existence. So now Gray Alys has to find, fight, and kill a post-apocalyptic werewolf. Imagine wishing for a million dollars and having to wait until the genie came up with a good enough idea to wow the judges on “Shark Tank” and you have got some sense of how much of a pain in the ass this arrangement must be for everybody involved.
Gray Alys needs a tracker — for reasons which are not very well explained and look a lot like a plot hole since she’s an unstoppable warrior herself — so she hires a bounty hunter named Boyce, played by Dave Bautista, to take her to a place called Skull River because everybody knows that’s where a werewolf lives. Along the way they are hunted by the religious zealots in a post-apocalyptic evil super locomotive which, depending on the needs of the plot, is either so fast it can outpace our heroes or so slow the villains fall way behind them for hours.
Along the way Gray Alys and Boyce fight those zealots in slow-motion. They also fight monsters in slow-motion. And they kinda-sorta make a connection in the way only laconic badasses whose love story was preordained by Hollywood gods can. Which is to say, in slow-motion. And unconvincingly.
“In the Lost Lands” is based on a 1982 short story by George R.R. Martin, a writer who gets a lot of flack for not finishing “A Song of Ice and Fire” and not nearly enough credit for all the other cool stuff he has done. Anderson’s film does not quite capture the alluring pulpiness inherent to Martin’s story but Martin’s story is — at least in its broad strokes — smartly and imaginatively conceived. When the ending rolls around the plot turns out to have been rather clever and poetic, and at least some of the characters reveal they had depth all along. If we had seen any indication of this beforehand, we might have cared.
We are long overdue for a reappraisal of Paul W.S. Anderson’s whole body of work, and not just “Mortal Kombat” and “Event Horizon,” the only two movies everyone seems to give a free pass to. When he’s making movie magic in wackyland there are few modern filmmakers who are as blissfully, unapologetically overblown. Somehow all the dramatic heaviness of “In the Lost Lands” weighs him down here, waging war against his obvious attempts to make the movie fun — attempts which in turn rob the material of its poetry. Something got lost alright, and it was not any danged lands.
“In the Lost Lands” opens in theaters on March 7.
