movie review the lost city of z

The Lost City of Z

“The Lost City of Z” is about an Englishman who’s determined to find an ancient city in the Brazilian jungle. But it’s really about what happens when you get older and realize that your youthful dreams haven’t come true yet: you either ratchet expectations back a bit, or double down and charge harder in the direction of your obsession, realizing that it’s not as easy to maintain momentum as it used to be. Viewers who are familiar with the true story the film is based on will enjoy it on an immersive level, savoring the period details and arguing about whether they were represented accurately by writer and director James Gray (“ We Own the Night ,” “ The Immigrant “). as well as whether the film is anti-colonial enough for modern tastes. Those who don’t know anything about the tale going in (a category that included me) might be gobsmacked by what happens. The order of events doesn’t stick to any established commercial movie template. What happens feels as random yet inevitable as life itself.

Charlie Hunnam stars as Percy Fawcett, a British Army officer who in the first part of the 20th century led expeditions into the Amazon jungle to find the titular city, which he named Zed, or Z. Fawcett hoped that finding Z would prove his theory that—contrary to the racist attitudes of the same people funding his expeditions—certain nonwhite civilizations were more advanced than any western society in existence at the same time. Percy also had deeper, personal motivations, chief among them to prove himself a respectable Englishman, especially since his father’s Army career destructed in a blaze of alcoholic misbehavior (“He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” a superior officer says of Percy). Percy would never describe himself in these terms, because Freudian self-analysis wasn’t a thing back then, but he is driven by a need to prove that he’s the opposite of his father in every way: a reliable officer, an important explorer, a dedicated family man.

That last ambition takes a bit of a hit, though, because Percy keeps going back to the jungle in hopes of finding the lost city. His wife Nina ( Sienna Miller ) is a proto-feminist, or at least more liberated than English army wives tended to be in the early 1900s. When she speaks of their marriage as a partnership of equals, it’s clear that she really means it, and that Percy and the movie respect her vision. But as Nina points out, when Percy repeatedly leaves England for South America to lead a band of similarly obsessive men (including his best friend, Corporal Henry Costin, a terrific character turn by Robert Pattinson ) he’s forcing her into the traditional role of supportive wife and caretaker to their kids, and assuming that she’ll subordinate her own dreams (which he hasn’t asked about) to his.

Gray has become one of my favorite American filmmakers. He has the ability to do what’s called “world building” in science fiction and fantasy, but with real subcultures and places. Whether he’s imagining 1990s outer-borough New York City in “ Little Odessa ” and “ The Yards ” or the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side in “The Immigrant,” he and his production team are phenomenally attentive to fine details of grooming, dress, posture, and speech. They even notice the different ways that light falls on faces and the folds of clothing depending on whether a scene is lit by fluorescent lights, early oil lamps, a campfire or the moon. Here, as in his other films, you never feel that you’re watching one of those prototypical Oscar-baiting period movies where “every dollar is onscreen” but everything feels a bit too polished and carefully arranged. Whether it is re-creating a fancy dress ball filled with English Army officers and their partners and servants or a camp in the Amazon basin staffed with slaves and ruled by the Portuguese boss of a rubber trading company (a brief but sensationally effective appearance by Franco Nero ), “The Lost City of Z” doesn’t unveil a world but merely presents it, in a matter of fact way, by having characters exist within it.

More important, though, is the film’s attention to character. Visually, Percy’s story is aligned with a tradition of films about white Europeans traveling to “exotic” parts of the world and getting swallowed up by their obsessions. There are unabashed nods to “ Lawrence of Arabia ,” “ Apocalypse Now ” and several Werner Herzog classics; you even get a double-hit of “Apocalypse Now” and “ Fitzcarraldo ” when Percy and his explorers come upon an opera house that was built to bring high European culture to the “savages.” The ironies, indignities and cruelties of this era are never far from the film’s mind.

There’s a long, unexpectedly gripping scene deep in the movie where Percy tries to justify the need for another expedition to a roomful of peers who think of South America as a land of exploitable subhumans that’s of interest only for its natural resources. The film doesn’t sugarcoat their casual viciousness and greed, but it doesn’t turn Percy into a white savoir, either. Here, as elsewhere, Percy is only slightly more sensitive than the people whose money and approval he seeks. He treats the Amazon tribespeople with respect and affection, but they are ultimately a means to an end, a way of getting him closer to his dream of finding that city.

Percy’s behavior toward his family is equally complicated, admirable in some ways and appalling in others. He’s a kind and decent individual, and he seems genuinely sorry for all the grief he puts his wife through, and guilty for letting his children grow up while he spends years away from them. But he still keeps going back into the jungle, and he eventually draws his eldest son Jack (played as a teenager by Tom Holland ) into his dream, while seeming oblivious to the fact that he’s exploiting the boy’s desire to get close to a dad who was never around.

The movie has its problems. There are moments when Nina’s dialogue strains to convince 21st century viewers that the character is fiery and independent. Percy can be too recessive and nice for the film’s own good. And a depiction of trench combat in World War I Europe, which interrupted Percy’s trips to South America, is appropriately harrowing but did not need to take up as much real estate as it does. (The war sequence also contrives to place previously established characters together on the same battlefield for the sake of narrative continuity when they probably weren’t all there in life—a rare case where the movie seems to be coddling the viewer.)

But Hunnam’s performance is charming and lived in, easily the best work he’s ever done, and scene for scene, this is a splendid film. As shot by Darius Khondji (“ Seven “), who’s better at re-creating early man-made light sources than any living cinematographer, the movie is beautiful but never ostentatiously pretty. And it’s wise about how to use actual historical events as metaphors for basic desires (to succeed, to redeem oneself). It never forgets that that these were real people whose words and deeds had consequences that should not be swept under the carpet for the sake of a happy ending.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

Michael Ford-FitzGerald as Hunt Leader
Franco Nero as Baron de Gondoriz
Angus MacFadyen as James Murray
Sienna Miller as Nina Fawcett
Johann Myers as Willis
Edward Ashley as Arthur Manley
Aleksandar Jovanović as Urquhart
Robert Pattinson as Henry Costin
Tom Holland as Jack Fawcett
Charlie Hunnam as Percival Fawcett
Daniel Huttlestone as Brian Fawcett
Christopher Spelman

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Darius Khondji

Writer (based on the book by)

David Grann
John Axelrad

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[NOTE: This is a re-post of our review from the New York Film Festival; The Lost City of Z expands nationwide, April 21]

There's a moment not all that long into The Lost City of Z that brings up an enigmatic, intimate element of the past, in a movie that very much pivots on the personal stakes of world history. Colonel Percy Fawcett, played with physical ingenuity and dramatic intensity by Charlie Hunnam , arrives back in England after a long stretch of keeping the peace in Ireland, a post he took after exploring Sri Lanka as a mapmaker. In a discussion that leads to his trip up the Amazon, to map an area of jungle on the border between Brazil and Bolivia, one of his senior officers ( Ian McDiarmind ) at the RGS speaks of Fawcett's father. More importantly, the officer suggests that Fawcett's work in South America could scrub out the stains of notoriety that have marked his family's name since the days of his father, whose crimes or assumed slights against society go undivulged in the film's narrative other than a passing mention of "the bottle."

From the outset, this humid, deeply human movie, directed by James Gray , comes on like a classic adventure tale, one where a governmentally decorated go-getter seeks discovery, excitement, and a sterling reputation in an unknown land where his life is worth little more than a possible dinner for a hungry local tribe. And to his credit, Gray delivers that movie with all the ribbons and bows on it. On his first expedition, he loses at least two colleagues to spears and another to a swarm of ravenous piranhas. At one point, he nearly dies the same way, near-blind and underwater. Gray, who has barely left the five boroughs in his previous films, has a quick taste for the exotic, verdant environs and his elegiac, gorgeous compositions, often tinted by yellow, blue-grey, and sickly green, convey the feeling of witnessing the past without putting the action at a remove. Strung together with accents, lingo, wardrobe, political and historical discourse, and a myriad of other detail-accurate ornamental elements, Gray's atmosphere never feels as if it's overworking to remind you of when this all takes place, and yet both the popular and personal opinions of the time are constantly teeming in the audience's head.

And yet, Gray's adaptation of David Grann 's beloved bestseller is a far quieter, more ruminative, and confidently intimate movie than all that would suggest. Quiet would not always be something you'd say as a compliment but in this case, it's crucial. Hunnam does give Fawcett a booming soldier's voice but it's used with measure and his main partner in his explorations, Henry Costin ( Robert Pattinson ), barely raises his voice above a sarcastic mumble or groan. The sounds of the world they are moving through, whether it be the domineering symphony of the jungle or the rhythmic bustle of city streets and stadiums of law. It's immersive without demanding your attention.

It also puts more of a focus on the discussions, which begin to center more and more on the discoverer's obsession with finding the beginnings of civilization in what he dubs the titular, hidden away realm, up the Amazon. This is the story of a true progressive in the political sense, refusing to believe that the aristocracy was the beginning and the end of all civilization, but Gray rightly sees the stubborn, vindictive, and lethally ambitious side of Fawcett as well. In fact, he highlights it. This is the story of a true progressive, but it's also the story of a man who needed the world to know that he was better than the class label that they stamped him with the minute he came into the world. Gray has always seen the ambitions of immigrant families and the generations that they beget as both beautiful and fatal, enlightened and damned. The obsessive love that Joaquin Phoenix 's burdened laundromat worker, Leonard, has for the hard-partying shiksa up a flight or two from him in Two Lovers is also a want to break from the traditionalism of his loving but deeply intrusive Jewish family. So, though there are spears, rafts, deadly animals, protective natives, and all other sorts of peril, Fawcett is in fact not all that dissimilar from the city boys that Gray tends towards otherwise in his oeuvre.

charlie-hunnam-the-lost-city-of-z-image-4

It's also, like those movies, a reflection of Gray's own struggles with being the son of immigrants and an artist in no short supply of artistic and commercial ambition. Gray's been one of the best American filmmakers around since the 1990s, when Little Odessa and The Yards established him as the pre-eminent post-Scorsesian New York filmmaker. Even those masterworks, mind you, couldn't clearly set the stage for Two Lovers and The Immigrant , two of the most alluring and near-confessional American films of this or any other decade. Still, Gray had intentions towards something bigger, something like a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, which he hinted toward in the jump toward period detail in The Immigrant . The Lost City of Z is a glorious, ambitious feat of filmmaking about an even more adventurous man who lost everything to his need to prove that he's better than their all-guiding class ranking, that they are wrong.

A character like Angus Macfadyen 's Murray, a wealthy, Wellesian adventurer who helps fund Fawcett's second voyage up the Amazon, after finding proof of early civilization in the form of pottery, doubles as a kind of disclosure about what it's like to work with an overbearing producer or another production colleague. And yet, he is a well-rounded character, given Shakespearean heft in physicality and delivery by Macfadyen, as is Fawcett's long-suffering wife, Nina, played with potent fury and humor by Sienna Miller . One of the film's best sequences is a simple bedroom chat between Fawcett and his beloved, wherein he demands that she not follow him on his second expedition through Bolivia with Murray. As open to the idea as Fawcett is when they initially speak about it, it's clear that even he depends, to a certain extent, on sexism and the reinforcement of gender roles. And her stunted career is only one of a few major sacrifices that the family gives to the idea of finding Z.

One would hope on the evidence of this movie, this masterpiece, that Gray would have studios lining up to back whatever his next movie might be, and its that where I think Fawcett's mysterious end, gone missing in the Amazon with his similarly courageous son, Jack ( Tom Holland ), might reflect Gray's feelings. The feeling of true purpose still seems to allude Fawcett up until the end, like a hard itch at the back of his cranium, lost in the jungle amongst tribesman that he cannot reason with. Does any endeavor to express an idea in any medium bring mental or physical sustenance? Gray remains ambivalent but not particularly hopeful through the lens of Fawcett, but as every writer you've ever read has written before, the journey is the thing. Gray doesn't even give the adventure of the story untainted glory but he gives what could have been an easy-bake nostalgia trip to Hollywood classicism—a la the original Mutiny on the Bounty — into something wholly contemplative, resonantly melancholic, wise, and cuttingly personal.

Robert Pattinson

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The Lost City of Z Reviews

Although the film may shine sporadically as a biographical story, it largely disappoints as a jungle adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 4, 2024

Perhaps it's the film's jungle setting that matches James Gray's meandering tone; the film deals with doubt and uncertainty, and the sense of feeling lost in time amidst the smoky jungle landscapes feels complimentary rather than contradictory.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 1, 2024

It cannot be understated: The Lost City of Z is a revelation.

Full Review | Dec 6, 2023

You can’t help but see shades of Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo”. Even touches of John Huston come to mind.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 23, 2022

The Lost City of Z contains a rare kind of grandeur and intimacy that only filmmakers like Lean or Anthony Minghella.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 4, 2022

James Gray's The Lost City of Z has moments that hearken back to any old Hollywood adventure epic, the grand journeys of yesteryear in which destination and discovery were the sole rewards.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

At over two hours, the film drags. Which is a shame, because a story this good deserves to be turned into an all-time classic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 18, 2021

Deliberately old-fashioned in many respects, this uneven, episodic two-and-a-half-hour saga is nonetheless quite richly rewarding in the end.

Full Review | Oct 14, 2020

Regardless of whether or not The Lost City of Z provides the answers its pursuers seek, the journey to find Z provides enough meditations for a lifetime.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 24, 2020

In the case of James Gray's visually sumptuous and richly melodic film The Lost City of Z, it turns that actually sometime they do make them like they used to.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 24, 2020

An underrated biographical epic featuring a soulful performance from the cast, especially Charlie Hunnam as the protagonist. I appreciate the fact that it's more of a reflective character study than an action-packed adventure film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 10, 2020

The Lost City of Z has a sumptuous and elegant epic it might be, doesn't quite justify all the effort put in by everyone involved.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

For a grand adventure, there's no grandeur and not a whit of adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jul 1, 2020

[The film] starts off underwater, but by the end it's breathing sweet, sweet air. Its redemption comes when we realize that the story isn't about Amazonian exploration at all.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

Director Gray strikes a remarkable balance between the family drama, the class and status struggle Fawcett goes through, and the actual explorations, and how different each journey is.

Full Review | May 6, 2020

It's a little long but just short of being a masterpiece. There is much to love about The Lost City of Z which is one of the best movies of the year so far.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 22, 2020

That the meetings of geographical societies used to be such animated affairs is one of the revelations of James Gray's film. Another revelation is that Gray has amazing classical chops.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2020

Instead of painting a dapper Indiana Jonesian picture of a valiant white man making friends with the natives and conquering the jungle, it shows Fawcett as self-obsessed.

Full Review | Jan 7, 2020

Grandiloquent, methodical, and fascinating, the new direction is becoming for Gray, who masterfully conjures a mysterious period of anticipation, when the world was uncharted and carried unimaginable secrets in its bosom.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 9, 2019

Percy Fawcett's persistence to follow his obsession continually tests his endurance and resolve. It's worth investing the 2 hour and 20 minutes to find out if he really found his lost city.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2019

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Review: Hearts of Darkness and Light in ‘The Lost City of Z’

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By Manohla Dargis

April 13, 2017

In “The Lost City of Z,” a lush, melancholic story of discovery and mystery, a mesmerizing Charlie Hunnam plays a British adventurer in the Amazon who is consumed by “all the glories of exploration,” as Joseph Conrad once wrote of a different journey. Enveloped by the forest, the explorer and his crew face snakes, piranhas, insects and that most terrifying of threats: other people, who at times bombard the strangers with arrows. Undaunted, he perseveres, venturing more deeply into a world that first becomes a passion and then something of a private hallucination. It’s 1906, and while wonders like moving pictures are rapidly shrinking the world, the dream of unknown lands endures.

That dream isn’t only about the Amazon in “The Lost City of Z” but also about the movies and their ability to transport us to astonishing new worlds. For us, the Age of Discovery is long gone and, for the most part, so are old-fashioned historical epics, other than the occasional Chinese extravaganza or one of those international waxworks with clashing accents. Hollywood used to churn these out regularly, but they’ve faded, casualties of shifting industry logic, audience taste, cultural norms and other pressures. The romance of adventure has largely shifted from history to fantasy fiction, an easier, less contested playground for conquering white heroes.

In “The Lost City of Z,” the writer-director James Gray has set out to make a film in the colonial era that suggests the likes of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” but through a sensitive, contemporary lens. It’s one that starts from the premise that while white men have long been the keepers of the historical record, they didn’t make the past single-handedly. The story that Mr. Gray has chosen seems an unlikely candidate for such revisionism because it turns on Lieut. Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who came to believe in the existence of a lost Amazonian civilization. He called it the lost city of Z; others called it El Dorado , a European illusion that proved catastrophic for the New World.

The movie opens shortly before Fawcett is approached by the Royal Geographical Society to map uncharted territory in Bolivia. A career soldier and son of a disgraced aristocrat, Fawcett is anxious to change his fortunes and increase his social standing. Leaving behind, rather too easily, his loving wife, Nina (Sienna Miller, wonderful), and their young son (later played by Tom Holland), he sets off and is soon struggling through the Amazon with a small crew that includes an aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (an excellent Robert Pattinson, shaggy and almost unrecognizable). Deep in a jungle, where each wonder is matched by terror, Fawcett is ravaged — and then transformed — by his discoveries of both a new world and another self.

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What Is Cinema?

Gorgeous, Enthralling The Lost City of Z Is One of 2017’s Best Movies

A purveyor of earnest, New York-set chamber dramas, writer-director James Gray does not immediately seem like a filmmaker who could, or would, craft a true epic. His elegant and underseen 2013 period piece The Immigrant perhaps suggested that his purview was widening. But nothing on his résumé indicated that he was capable of something on the scale of The Lost City of Z , his rich and glorious adaptation of David Grann’s excellent nonfiction book about Amazonian exploration in the early 20th century. (Opening April 14.) And yet he pulls it off—more than pulls it off—in staggeringly artful fashion. An enveloping meditation on obsession and manhood, The Lost City of Z is one of the best films released so far this year. Gray has made an old-fashioned epic that trembles and sighs, illuminates and moves with contemporary insight.

Telling the story of Percy Fawcett, a respected but undecorated British military officer who found fame, admiration, and eventual doom in his treks into the Bolivian Amazon, The Lost City of Z could have been a troublingly fawning bit of colonial nostalgia. But Gray is careful to highlight the noxious entitlement that guided Fawcett and his fellow gentlemen explorers, men who thought that inhabited places could be discovered, as if something did not fully exist until a white man had gazed upon it. But as Fawcett’s quixotic mission to find the fabled city of the title gradually becomes something less imperial and more deeply personal, his Edwardian fixation on his honor evolves into an almost religious ardor. In that way, The Lost City of Z swells to rather grand proportions; at its most searching and profound, the film might be about nothing less than the quest for the meaning of life.

It might be. Or it might just be a thrilling and gorgeously rendered adventure-tragedy. Fawcett is played by Charlie Hunnam, an actor whom I’ve perhaps unfairly dismissed until now. Here he gives as magnetic a leading-man turn as I’ve seen in some time, capturing Fawcett’s decency, his piousness, and his arrogance with towering conviction. He’s well matched by a laconic but present Robert Pattinson as Fawcett’s trusty sidekick, and by Sienna Miller, who plays Fawcett’s wife, Nina. Miller has had a years-long run of playing Great Men's wives and girlfriends, from American Sniper to Foxcatcher to Burnt to Live by Night . In Lost City of Z , at least, she’s given something to do and say. Gray finds ways to grant Nina agency despite the oppression suffered by women—even those of status—of her era. Miller seizes that opportunity with relish, especially in the film’s achingly lovely final scene. Someone please give her a lead role already.

These fine performances ( Tom Holland, young Spider-Man himself, is also quite good as Fawcett’s son Jack) are housed in a construction of boggling technical mastery. Working with cinematographer Darius Khondji and shooting on lush, grainy 35-millimeter film, Gray favors thoughtful composition over flashy camerawork. The Lost City of Z is staid and sincere, which allows room for the jungle, in all its danger and allure, to truly breathe. As it regards this looming green tangle, the film hums with fear and reverence. By The Lost City of Z ’s stunning penultimate scene, Gray, Khondji, and composer Christopher Spelman have conjured up a heady mix of ecstasy and mania, a fevered manifestation of Fawcett’s psychology, his unrelenting drive, his consuming hunger. This is heavy, serious, nearly metaphysical stuff, but Gray handles it all deftly. Weighty and solemn as its themes may be, The Lost City of Z is Gray’s most agile, most graceful film. It’s leavened by its humanity—and, in the end, by a kind of agnostic spirituality.

Movies about obsession can be exhausting; think of all the fuzzy-brain itch of Zodiac or Zero Dark Thirty . (Why all the Zs in obsession movie titles?) There are certainly moments in The Lost City of Z when Fawcett’s suicidal, vainglorious ambition is frustrating, and the values expressed in the film—about masculinity in particular—are, in their way, infuriating. But Gray’s film is only about these notions, rather than acting as a supportive vessel for them. Instead of making the macho, unthinking epic that a lesser director could have drawn out of this material, Gray has located something more compassionate; he’s found a vein of introspection and philosophy that gives The Lost City of Z a bracing universality.

Yes, the film is the specific story of one man gone mad with visions of a hidden place. But it’s also about the ways people yearn for a sense of purpose and definition, how we can sabotage our lives in our attempts to ennoble them. It’s about human folly—the sad and familiar and beautiful tragedy of it. Gray’s film is breathtaking in its scope, but all the more remarkable for how intimate it feels, how oddly relatable. We may not have hacked our way into the jungle in search of ourselves, but we’ve all probably taken some kind of journey into the unknown, hoping to reemerge fuller, more understood, more alive. Which is, as it happens, quite similar to how I felt, and I hope you’ll feel, when the closing credits of this immersive and marvelous film finally rolled.

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The Lost City of Z

A true-life drama, centering on British explorer Major Percival Fawcett, who disappeared whilst searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s. A true-life drama, centering on British explorer Major Percival Fawcett, who disappeared whilst searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s. A true-life drama, centering on British explorer Major Percival Fawcett, who disappeared whilst searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s.

David Grann
Charlie Hunnam
Robert Pattinson
Sienna Miller
331 User reviews
291 Critic reviews
78 Metascore
5 wins & 31 nominations

Top cast 73

Percy Fawcett

Henry Costin

Nina Fawcett

Jack Fawcett

Arthur Manley

James Murray

Sir George Goldie

Sir John Scott Keltie

Madame Kumel

Jack Fawcett (7 Yr Old)

Jack Fawcett (3 Yr Old)

Brian Fawcett (15 Yr Old)
Brian Fawcett (7 Yr Old)

Lord James Bernard
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Director James Gray wrote to Francis Ford Coppola , who directed Apocalypse Now (1979) , asking for advice about shooting in the jungle. Coppola's two-word reply was "Don't go." Coppola had received the same advice from Roger Corman .
Goofs In many of the scenes the party is going visibly downstream while they are searching for the origin of the river.

Nina Fawcett : To dream to seek the unknown. To look for what is beautiful is its own reward. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

Crazy credits Near the end of the credits, jungle noises resume.
Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Sienna Miller/Anthony Bourdain/Chris Cornell (2017)
Soundtracks The Rite of Spring: The Augurs of Spring, Dances of the Young Girl Composed by Igor Stravinsky Published by Boosey and Hawkes, Inc. (ASCAP)

User reviews 331

robbierunciman-1
Mar 25, 2017
April 21, 2017 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Thành Phố Vàng Đã Mất
Keep Your Head
MICA Entertainment
MadRiver Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$30,000,000 (estimated)
Apr 16, 2017
$19,263,938

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 21 minutes
Dolby Digital

More to explore

The Lost City of Z Is a Mysterious, Enthralling Masterpiece

James Gray’s exploration of the Amazon at the turn of the 20th century is the best work of his career.

An essential job of great epic cinema is to conjure the unimaginable for viewers, to create glorious sights and give them depth and context, to try and take in the beauty of the natural world while also grappling with its terrifying force. James Gray’s The Lost City of Z succeeds in this task. A film about venturing into the unknown, it delves into mysteries that will never fully be solved and digs into the mindset of an explorer. But beyond that, it wants to depict the search for meaningful fulfillment, to try and understand why someone might risk life and limb in pursuit of the sublime.

The Lost City of Z is a miraculous movie, at once moving, intimidating, and gorgeous to behold. It’s a tale of colonial exploration that’s aware of the sins of the past, and a portrait of a driven, obsessive, flawed male protagonist that avoids the clichés of the genre. It feels like a work of classic Hollywood cinema, but without the arch, mannered quality that can come with a contemporary director trying to harken back to the past. Gray’s film is beguiling and poetic, capable of gluing you to the screen for every second of its languorous 150-minute running time and lingering in the brain for weeks after.

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Adapted from David Grann’s 2009 work of non-fiction, The Lost City of Z follows Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), a British military man-turned-explorer who first ventured into the Amazon rainforest at the turn of the century. At first, Fawcett was dispatched as a surveyor, but eventually he became convinced there was evidence of a lost civilization hidden in the jungle, one as technologically advanced as any in the ancient world. Accompanied by a salty aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson), and, later, by his own son Jack (Tom Holland), Percy returned again and again to the Amazon in search of evidence he could bring home, flying in the face of then-held beliefs about the intellectual limits of “primitive” societies.

I haven’t gravitated toward Hunnam as an actor in the past, since he’s so often slotted into handsome leading-man roles entirely lacking in dimensionality (as in Pacific Rim ). But as Percy, he’s sensational. His character is driven and haunted, but not insane or unfulfilled, given his happy marriage to Nina (Sienna Miller) and his obvious love for his three children. Hunnam portrays Percy’s fixation on the Amazon as something that’s not easily dismissed: A mix of ego, a desire for fame, and genuine intellectual fascination keeps pulling him back into a life of danger and long separation from his family.

His repeated trips find him boating down the Amazon river on simple rafts with Costin and other local guides, navigating the complicated political landscapes of Bolivia and Brazil as the region is ravaged by rubber tycoons, warring colonial powers, and the creeping threat of industrialization. Gray makes it clear that Percy is a white invader in a land he doesn’t understand, while recognizing that his contentions—that Amazonian societies had farmed the earth, built complex structures, and created pottery and art—were seen as absurd and borderline offensive in Great Britain.

The notion that such advanced civilizations could have existed in South America was widely dismissed in the West, but Percy had an empathy for the region that was unusual. While others are seeking to strip the Amazon’s resources away, he wants only to witness its ancient artifacts. Industrial-scale expeditions bring guns into the jungle to do battle with local tribes, but Percy simply tries to reason with them, looking to find common ground so that they can help him search more deeply into the jungle.

Gray captures all of these dynamics with appropriate subtlety. He doesn’t dismiss the danger that Percy and his crew face around every river bend, or inadvertent harm they could do to the rainforest by attracting more Westerners with their discoveries. But he also emphasizes that Percy’s fascination with the region borders on the religious, as if discovery of these ancient wonders will finally answer some formless question gnawing at his soul. How else to comprehend the mind of the explorer who returns to the Amazon over and over again with little more than a pack full of food and a compass?

Just as incredible, and unusual, is the amount of time Gray spends with Nina, who’s far from the lifeless stereotype of a wife at home that Miller has played many times before (in films like American Sniper and Foxcatcher ). She’s a well-rounded partner to Percy, an idiosyncratic figure who strains against the sexism of her era while still supporting her husband in whatever way she can. Gray is committed to the emotional depth of every character, from the guide who leads Percy down the river to the self-important, prideful James Murray (Angus Macfadyen), a fellow explorer who accompanies him on a later trip, to the inscrutable but faithful Costin (easily Pattinson’s best screen performance to date).

At the same time, the director never loses sight of the natural wonders he’s trying to capture, or of the nebulous mysteries Percy is trying to fathom. Gray has long been a favorite of cineastes, but I’ve often found his work (such as 2007’s crime thriller We Own the Night or 2013’s period drama The Immigrant ) gorgeous but frustratingly remote, technically well executed but emotionally distant. The Lost City of Z bridges those gaps—it’s beautiful to look at, but what makes it unforgettable is its deep compassion for its characters and their inner lives. It’s the best film of the year thus far, and it’ll be a hard one to top.

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The Lost City of Z Isn’t the Epic You Might Expect, But It Takes You on a Ride

First, let’s be clear that most of the characters in The Lost City of Z are Brits, which means the Z is pronounced “Zed” rather than “Zee,” you Yankee ignoramus. Saying “Zed” is important, I think, because it points up the stark contrast between the film’s principal settings: early-20th-century England, which is musty and high-toned and reeking of pretension, and the Amazon jungle, which is verdant and buggy and reeking of decay, both vegetal and human. Early on, the English explorer Percy Fawcett ( Charlie Hunnam ) learns that deep in those perilous South American forests there might — might — be the remnants of a lost civilization, the existence of which endangers the unobliging noblesse of his colonialist superiors. (They sent him there to prevent a border war that would threaten the empires of sundry rubber barons.) Surely savages, his countrymen cry, couldn’t have had an advanced culture before the English! For Fawcett, proof of such a city would not only secure his fame and fortune. It would deal a blow to an aristocracy that cast him out after his father’s disgrace. He would advance on the basis of his mettle rather than his ancestry.

The Lost City of Z (ed) was first a book by David Grann, who framed Fawcett’s life as a mystery to be filled in with his own investigation. Director and screenwriter James Gray has opted to tell the story without a mediating modern journalist, inventing what he doesn’t know and changing the dramatic emphasis. Gray’s other films (among them We Own the Night and The Immigrant ) center on families or surrogate families whose loyalties are tested and affirmed. So rather than blindly obsessed adventurer, this Fawcett is a torn husband and father, guilty over his abandonment of his wife, Nina (Sienna Miller), and three children. His oldest, Jack (played as a young man by Tom Holland), is plainly bereft, which leads to a final act in which father and son cement their connection to each other and the universe. It’s a strange turn for a movie like this — both terrible and moving.

The Lost City of Z(ed) isn’t as expansive as you might initially wish but still pulls you in and along. Fawcett’s aide-de-camp, Henry Costin, is played by Robert Pattinson behind a full beard and spectacles, and he gives the river scenes a contemplative quality, somewhat like Mr. Spock. The air is filled with cacophonous birdcalls and sounds that can’t be identified or placed. Arrows fly out of the trees and kill members of the expedition, but the tribesmen — even the cannibalistic ones — seem less malevolent than ruled by instinct. A tribe might eat you or feed you — you never know. When a rich man (Angus Macfadyen) who boasts that he accompanied the polar explorer Shackleton bullies his way onto the second voyage, he succumbs most of all to the uncertainty. He wants to sue Fawcett for an apology. The movie has a more familiar piece of absurdism: a rubber baron (Franco Nero) who has built an opera house and dominates the indigenous people by force. The whip scars on the natives’ backs tell the story. You know the opera house will be gone in a relative instant, overwhelmed by the wilderness it crassly attempts to ennoble.

Gray has an unusual temperament for a film like this, humbled rather than stirred. Until the finale, he doesn’t charge the landscape with mysticism the way such would-be visionaries as Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola do. He doesn’t seem to identify with Fawcett’s monomania — or perhaps Hunnam is more buttoned-up than Gray’s usual alter ego, the feverishly unstable Joaquin Phoenix. The film’s most dominant personality is, incredibly enough, Sienna Miller in the standard role of the stick-in-the-mud female who says “Think of your family” or, failing to domesticate her man, “Be careful.” Miller gives her pleas and remonstrations dramatic force — you believe her when she says she wants to accompany her husband. She’s also the only actor with whom Gray has intimacy. The camera doesn’t photograph her from the side and she has no beard or glasses.

It’s worth adding that we should treasure the visionary-but-reckless-explorer genre while it still exists, given that it’s too early in the life span of Earthlings for tales of real-life space exploration and too late for contemporary stories of going where no white person has gone before. The makers of Kong: Skull Island had to set their film in the early 1970s because the coming of satellites meant the end of the “uncharted” island. Besides, indigenous cultures are all but gone, as jungles are denuded and the poles shrink into puddles. We might soon be nostalgic for the days when we were mauled by tigers or eaten by cannibals.

*This article appears in the April 3, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

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Den of Geek

The Lost City of Z Review

The Lost City of Z, with Charlie Hunnam and Tom Holland, is a wonderful throwback epic with modern insights about the danger in discovery.

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There is a feral beauty to the exotic locations the British Empire wandered into during the height of its 19th century supremacy. Supposedly bathed in untouched green, and as menacingly inviting as the serpentine Amazon River itself, the Great White explorer’s life was meant to be one of tranquil blue sheens that hid carnivorous fish beneath its gloss—and perhaps a “lost” civilization or two in its jungled depths.

Such gross simplifications of faraway lands, which feature heavily in certain characters’ psychology during The Lost City of Z , is the stuff adventure yarns and imperial conquest are built on. This lifestyle has also been thoroughly explored in a number of iconic stories, from literature to cinema, and from Kipling to Herzog. Yet, one of the great strengths of James Gray’s The Lost City of Z film adaptation is that he cuts through that romance and uses it as a mirror for Western culture and the men who spread it. This is not simply a post-colonial condemnation of the past, but a triumphant and shrewdly intelligent modernization of the classic epics of yore. It also is the best narrative film to play at this year’s New York Film Festival.

As a movie, Z pinpoints the exact generational shift whereupon Victorian superiority descended into post-war waywardness. The exploits of this culture, which are often imagined as an escape into the purity of nature, instead become an extension of the very souls and obsessions that wished to vanish there in the first place.

The main spirit of the piece is Percy Fawcett, played here with a deliberately antiquated affectation by a superb Charlie Hunnam. Fawcett is the last guard of old Victoria’s classic English gentry. Alas then that when the film opens, it’s already 1905, with the queen long dead and Fawcett appearing as a man out of time. Despite wishing to rise in English society, he unfortunately suffers, as one of his aristocratic superiors notes, from “a poor choice in ancestors.” Presumably driven to excel to even greater heights due to his father’s own shortcomings, Percy has served with ambition in both North Africa and Asia, but by the time the film begins with him in Ireland, it is clear he’ll never be allowed into the military’s “inner circle.”

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At least that is until he is given an offer by the Royal Geographical Society to survey Bolivia, which remains one of the last frontiers of mysterious jungles and dangerous “savages.” It also allows him a chance to cool local tensions and potentially prevent another war for the homeland. So despite his beloved wife Nina (Sienna Miller) being pregnant with their second son, Fawcett departs and finds himself on the road to fame and success. For beyond tracing the source of the Rio Verde River, he also survives attacks from local natives and run-ins with piranhas. He even finds pottery and carvings in the deepest jungles, suggesting that, just maybe, a fabled lost city of gold really did exist beyond the reach of white men.

Fawcett is most remembered in history for his final trek to the Amazon in 1925 with his adult son Jack (Tom Holland), and how his adventures inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World . But the film’s strength is much more on how each venture to South America—and the Great War that interrupted those journeys—affected Fawcett’s constantly thwarted ambition, his relationship with Nina who he considered his equal (but “only of the mind”), and how the world he knew was just as lost as any ancient city by the end of World War I. Still, the pull of Fawcett’s mysterious “Z” city (“El Dorado” had too many negative connotations by the 20th century) remained inescapable.

Obviously, any film that deals with vanishing into South American jungles will be instantly compared to the Herzog classic where vainglorious conquistadors got lost in the woods. However, Gray’s film owes less to that than the sprawling and gingerly paced epics of about 50 or 60 years ago. Rather than tell just of one (or several) disappearances into the Amazon’s heat, The Lost City of Z is more of a traditional panorama that evokes life from a bygone age with sprawling storytelling. And the modernization of the material is that rather than becoming engrossed in Percy’s fascination—as how a David Lean protagonist might “go native”—Percy is ostensibly a product of turn-of-the-century English yearning and etiquette, with much of the film’s strongest elements being of that intimate portraiture at home.

Beautifully lensed by Darius Khondji in on 35mm celluloid, Fawcett’s England is one of smoke-adorned mahogany in dark corners and picturesque afternoons in the meadow. However, the sun is already setting on this world, even before the film travels to the grim WWI battlefields. Within this transition, the need for English explorers and adventurers already appears to be dying with every passing day, leading to a sophisticated, if mostly implied, relationship between the central husband and wife.

Sienna Miller, who is starting to make a career out of playing the dutiful and long suffering bride, gets her best role in that mold yet since Nina is very much an active part of the story, enjoying a life beyond asking for her husband to come home. In fact, they are both suffragists who behoove the rigidness of the culture they inhabit. Nevertheless, the film implies an implicit waffling from Percy, who speaks of modernization but finds himself lost in ever the ancient daydreams of golden cities, and classical British fantasies like climbing the nigh insurmountable class system. He likewise speaks about wishing to free the “Indians” of South America from slavery, but still seems to use them as merely a rationalization for his own passion of returning again and again to the jungle.

The Lost City of Z, better than any recent period piece in memory, encapsulates that dying gasp of an empire by studying a man who wishes to both transform his surroundings but hew to his contemporaries’ greatest laurels.

Of course, the jungle itself is a harrowing place in the film, and Hunnam and Percy’s frequent traveling companion, Henry Costin (an unrecognizably bearded Robert Pattinson), spend much of their scenes together surviving the river with rotating sidekicks, be it worldly redshirts earmarked as fish chow or an especially naïve middle-aged fool played by Angus Macfadyen. Hunnam and Pattinson are uniformly excellent at presenting, respectively, an elegant sense of English propriety and bemused hypocrisy while in the wild. Marvel’s newest webbed star, Tom Holland, also eventually gets in on the action in third act while sporting a fairly unconvincing moustache.

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Yet, the one area where the film stumbles a bit is surprisingly in the lush jungled vistas. While The Lost City of Z very clearly traveled to South American wilds and captured the grit of the landscape, the picture’s focus on the sense of English transference never allows itself to be fully immersed in that sense of remote euphoria and discovery that Fawcett obviously felt. Perhaps a conscious choice taken in order to give a broader view of this type of worldview that would drive a man to return again and again to places where he’d have to contend with cannibalistic tribes and poisonous snakes, the movie never quite gets the dirt under its own fingernails or fully shares that madness for finding hidden archaeological treasures. Similarly, audiences looking for more straightforward escapism might be surprised at how much more expansive the scope really is beyond the Amazon.

Still, The Lost City of Z is a tremendous achievement for Gray, his cast, and an elusive ambition that is hardly exclusive for the film’s protagonist. This picture is a trip into the past, both in terms of setting and in its determination to revisit a kind of grandiose storytelling that used to be the province of studios who now would never touch the stuff unless there could be some superpowers thrown in. Z is an unabashed throwback that revisits a lost form with a modern sensibility—discovering its great prize for the more adventurous of moviegoers.

4.5 out of 5

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

The Lost City of Z Review

A meditative and engrossing story about the strength of the human spirit..

The Lost City of Z marks yet another impressive addition to director James Gray’s growing filmography. Featuring a career-best lead performance from Charlie Hunnam and some truly awe-inspiring visuals, it’s yet another one of this year’s can’t-miss films.

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Elizabeth olsen's 2024 netflix movie with near-perfect rotten tomatoes score becomes global hit, halle berry confirms john wick spinoff status amid franchise expansion, the lost city of z is a handsome and ambitious historical epic, if also one that's more intellectually engaging than emotionally compelling..

In the year 1905, Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is a member of the British military who seeks to gain decorations and improve his own standing, as part of a larger effort to repair his legacy after his father ran the family name into the ground. Percy gets his chance to do just that when he is approached by the members of the Royal Geographic Society, including one Sir George Goldie (Ian McDiarmid), and offered a job - serving as the neutral third party who will map out the official border between Bolivia and Brazil - that is rather dangerous, but could prove very rewarding, should Percy succeed at it.

Accompanied by a group of fellow explorers that includes one Corporal Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson), Percy sets out to South America and winds up venturing deep into the heart of the Amazon jungles, rivers and rainforests that reside there. Over the course of their journey, the group happens upon the remnants of what Percy believes to be an ancient civilization (a city that he dubs "Z", pronounced "Zed") deep in the jungle - a hidden place that Percy thereafter becomes obsessed with returning to, in the hope of proving to the world that it does, beyond the shadow of a doubt, exist.

Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) looking through a telescope in The Lost City of Z.

The new film both written and directed by James Gray ( Two Lovers , The Immigrant ), The Lost City of Z adapts David Grann's 2009 non-fiction bestseller of the same name, into an old-fashioned cinematic journey into the heart of the jungle (both literal and figurative, here). Gray's adaptation brings the early 20th century world and Percy Fawcett's story to life in a steadily-paced manner that borders on being abstract and dreamlike at times; to the degree that it comes off as the modern arthouse film version of an Indiana Jones -style throwback adventure, and all which that implies. The Lost City of Z is a handsome and ambitious historical epic, if also one that's more intellectually engaging than emotionally compelling.

While Grann's source material paints Percy Fawcett's tale in a certain light (as implied by its subtitle, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon ), Gray's adaptation ultimately transforms the story into a parable about faith, spirituality and the human search for transcendence. Charlie Hunnam delivers one of his stronger performances to date as Mr. Fawcett in the film, selling the character's evolution from a younger man driven by simpler ambitions to a seasoned explorer whose obsession with finding the city of "Z" becomes more of a matter of belief than a quest for glory. Where The Lost of City struggles is to firmly connect the dots between the various stages of Percy's development as a character; at times, relying more on Hunnam's acting to sell Percy's convictions about the indigenous people and civilizations of Bolivia, without fully showing how he formed them.

The Lost City of Z similarly succeeds in streamlining the narrative of Grann's original book, covering a variety of subjects over its runtime - too many, at that. While Gray's movie starts out as a straightforward jungle adventure during its first act, it eventually spans around two decades' worth of time; touching upon everything from British classism to European racism, sexism and how global disillusionment in the wake of WWI fuels fan interest in Fawcett's expeditions. It's a lot of ground to cover and The Lost City of Z does a solid job on the whole, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) some of the issues it wrestles end up feeling like secondary thoughts that are forgotten, after a certain point in the film. As mentioned before, this makes The Lost City of Z more interesting as an intellectual exercise than a riveting cinematic experience, on the whole.

That being said, one area where The Lost City of Z unquestionably thrives is craftsmanship, in particular the cinematography by Darius Khondji (who also teamed up with Gray on The Immigrant and has become Woody Allen's frequent collaborator of late). The combination of Khondji and Gray's moody use of light and shadow, coupled with striking on-location compositions photographed in places such as Northern Ireland and Colombia, makes The Lost City of Z gorgeous to behold and worth seeing on the big screen for that reason alone. Much of the film's deliberate pacing comes from the editing style of John Axelrad (Gray's frequent collaborator), allowing The Lost City of Z to transition smoothly from scene to scene and further heightening the dream-esque temper of the film.

With Percy Fawcett's personal journey serving as the backbone of The Lost City of Z , the next best-developed character arc is given to Tom Holland as Percy's son, Jack; with Sienna Miller as Percy's wife, Nina, getting somewhat short-changed in the process. Nevertheless, both Holland and Miller further buoy their reputations as strong character actors with their work here, finding room to stand-out even as the spotlight remains fixed on Hunnam. The Lost City of Z 's larger supporting cast includes a number of distinguished screen veterans too (Ian McDiarmid and Franco Nero among them), though the most memorable side player in the film is easily Robert Pattinson (and his impressive beard) as Percy's loyal and capable, if somewhat offbeat, fellow explorer, Henry Costin.

If something like Kong: Skull Island puts a modern blockbuster spin on the old-school jungle adventure movie formula for general audiences, then The Lost City of Z does something similar for the non-mainstream/indie arthouse filmgoing crowd. Both are worth appreciating in their own ways, but where some moviegoers may find Skull Island to be mostly dumb and loud, others might find The Lost City of Z to be too slow and pretentious, based on their own storytelling preferences. With that in mind: for those who are interested in a mood-heavy jungle expedition, The Lost City of Z is one journey into the unknown that could prove more rewarding than not for them.

The Lost City of Z is now playing in U.S. theaters. It is 141 minutes long and is Rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, brief strong language and some nudity.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

The Lost City of Z

Based on author David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, The Lost City of Z retells the true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who journeys into the Amazon and discovers evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization that may have once inhabited the region. Despite being ridiculed by the scientific community, which regards the indigenous populations as “savages,” the determined Fawcett – supported by his devoted wife, his son, and his aide de camp – returns time and again to his beloved jungle in an attempt to prove his case.

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'The Lost City Of Z' Review: James Gray Journeys To The Jungle And Returns With A Great Film

What is it about the jungle that lures in filmmakers like a siren song? Over the years, auteurs like Werner Herzog ( Fitzcarraldo ), Francis Ford Coppola ( Apocalypse Now ), and Peter Weir ( The Mosquito Coast ) have married the untold beauty of unexplored lands with the obsession that borders on insanity exemplified by protagonists who go deeper into those lands. Now, we have a new entry in the subgenre: The Lost City of Z , courtesy of writer/director James Gray, telling a true story of a British explorer who's seduced by the jungles of South America once and is unable to shake their pull on his psyche. While The Lost City of Z is perhaps not as overheated a depiction of the madness of obsession as Fitzcarraldo or Apocalypse Now , it's no less entrancing and enormous.

The film spans two decades, starting in Ireland in 1905 as military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) struggles to make a name for himself in a world where ancestry is of vital importance, and his is shaky at best. Soon, Fawcett is approached by the Royal Geographical Society to survey and explore the far reaches of Bolivia with a small crew, including a bushy-bearded aide-de-camp (Robert Pattinson). As Fawcett travels down the river, he discovers what he believes to be tangible signs of a lost civilization that may have predated the English. In spite of traveling back to the mainland, his wife Nina (Sienna Miller), and their growing family, Fawcett's unable to shake the notion of what he calls the "final piece" of the puzzle of humanity, this city he dubs "Z."

Even more than those jungle-set dramas named above, The Lost City of Z is methodical and deliberate; it's a carefully paced 140-minute film so that Fawcett's decades-long journey – which includes serving on the front lines in World War I – feels as all-encompassing to the audience as it does to him. Hunnam bears the weight of that journey well; his performance represents a massive step up from his previous work in TV shows like Sons of Anarchy and genre pieces like Crimson Peak . Fawcett never descends into outsized madness like Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now , yet he's just as unwavering and confident in ways that border on self-defeating arrogance.

Whether trying to convince the skeptical, bigoted members of the Royal Geographical Society (who see the natives of the Amazon jungle as nothing more than savages who couldn't possibly have any kind of advanced society or lifestyle), the independent Nina, or even his own crew members, Fawcett is steadfast in his belief of something larger just beyond his grasp. Hunnam's take on the character is suitably, unerringly low-key but also persuasive. Through his fierce persistence, we can see both how charismatic Fawcett is as well as how obsessed the jungle has made him.

Hunnam's work is aided largely by Gray's ability, along with gifted cinematographer Darius Khondji, to capture the awe-inspiring beauty and horror of the Amazonian jungles. Whether or not there is a lost city, it's almost immediately clear why Fawcett, or anyone , would find the dark-green forest fascinating. His willingness to engage with the natives is seen as progressive, and is a natural extension of how captivating he finds "Amazonia." Gray and Khondji do a phenomenal job of making the jungle gorgeous and forbidding, making for an altogether evocative visual experience. (To their joint credit, the English countryside never looks any less beautiful, if much less wild.) In effect, The Lost City of Z is a balance between a deliberate character study and a David Lean-esque epic that demands to be seen on the big screen. Hunnam's performance plus the beautiful cinematography alone achieves that balance.

Gray's script, based on the book of the same name by David Grann, allows for more nuance than another film might in presenting an extremely dedicated man who essentially ignores his family in favor of his personal ambitions. It's a welcome surprise that, through the screenplay and Miller's layered performance, Nina isn't occupying the role of the hectoring wife and mother; the arguments she and her husband have present her as equal to Fawcett, if not more, as his relatively enlightened viewpoint on race relations doesn't extend to those of gender. There's similar nuance to the relationship that Fawcett has with his oldest son, Jack (played as an adult by Tom Holland). When Jack accuses his father of having been totally, inexcusably absent, the older man lashes out violently; it's only when Jack expresses interest in journeying to South America that his father becomes more effusive than ever before. Even in these small strokes, the film is truly haunting. That quality extends to the final section of the film and if you haven't read the book, you should go in cold.

The Lost City of Z thrives because it's always able to maintain a careful distance between its depiction of its protagonist and his desires. The allure of the jungle is impossible to escape for Percy Fawcett, but James Gray's film is able to detail why Fawcett couldn't stop himself from traveling to the heart of earthly darkness without overtly valorizing him. This is a remarkable film, filled with sumptuous visuals, an almost Kubrickian fastidiousness, and a solid central figure. It's a balancing act between the arthouse and the epic, an enormous achievement. /Film Rating: 9 out of 10

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Review: ‘The Lost City of Z’ is a mesmerizing adventure

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Modest and majestic at once, the films of James Gray patiently burrow their way into the souls of their characters and, maybe, into you. Gray is painterly and exacting — some might say to a fault. But his movies’ revelations are complex and contradictory — full of life’s messiness — and their formal textures break open with moments of transcendence.

So, yeah, I like them — particularly his last one, “The Immigrant,” and his new one, “The Lost City of Z.” Both are period films with a pulse and a now-ness the genre often lacks. Each plunges us into the passages of early 20th century strivers and leaves us with a shattering final image of departure. Like the tide, they overwhelm and then recede.

“He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” is how one character explains Percy Fawcett’s predicament early in “The Lost City of Z,” based on David Grann’s nonfiction book. Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is a British officer but decoration has eluded him, and his deceased, disgraced father has soiled his name.

Though craving action, he’s assigned in 1906 on a map-making mission to the “blank spaces” of Bolivia where the British are meant to act as “referees” in a territory dispute with Brazil. The expedition into the Amazon jungles soon fills him with a romantic sense of exploration (his wife, Nina, played by Sienna Miller, reads him Kipling’s “The Explorer”), and he travels across the Atlantic in search of glory and redemption. Success, he’s told, would change his lot “considerably.”

On the boat to South America, Fawcett meets his aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (an excellent, heavily bearded Robert Pattinson), who initially eyes his leader warily. “You might be a little too English for this jungle,” he says as they step through flies and snakes.

They and their small team travel up a river and it immediately feels as though “The Lost City of Z” has swum into the currents of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” The ominous notes are many: a glassy-eyed rubber baron (Franco Nero) whose business the British are there to protect; a native guide who warns that the river “is always danger"; the onset of hunger among the thinning crew.

But while Fawcett’s journey is grueling and frightful, he finds not madness in the jungle but wonder. His grandiose notions aren’t humbled in the Amazon, they’re elevated. Gray’s camera, too, stays composed, and he leads his epic in a more sprawling direction.

Fawcett believed that he found deep in the Amazon evidence of an ancient civilization. Upon his return to London, he’s hailed as a hero. (Made a celebrity by his exploits, the Stetson-wearing Fawcett was a forerunner to Indiana Jones.) But his claim of a lost city and a civilization older than England’s is mocked. He’s urged not to raise the stature of “the savage.”

The jungle becomes Fawcett’s compulsion, and, to the detriment of all else, he swells with ambition. It’s a huge step up for the magnetic Hunnam, who nevertheless struggles to find much but wide-eyed idealism behind Fawcett’s adventuring. More trips follow, as does WWI, but the tension that moves to the fore in “The Lost City of Z” is over the sacrifices necessitated by his dreams. With every journey taking years, he’s a stranger to his children. (Future “Spider-man” Tom Holland pivotally plays the eldest son Jack).

It isn’t just Fawcett’s sacrifices, either. Nina might have the appearance and size of a traditional secondary spouse role, but she’s beautifully performed by Miller as a proudly independent woman left to raise their children alone. Her own aspirations are obliterated. Colonialism is embedded in Fawcett’s story, but Gray has keenly sought out its quieter, unsung tragedies.

“The Lost City of Z” may, like early films by Gray, leave some thirsting for more swashbuckling adventure. But if you let the ebb and flow of the Fawcetts’ lives drift over you, the movie is a wellspring.

“The Lost City of Z,” a Bleecker Street, Amazon Studios release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “violence, disturbing images, brief strong language and some nudity.” Running time: 140 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

Follow AP Film Writer on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

The Lost City Of Z Review

24 Mar 2017

141 minutes

Lost City of Z, The

Having spent much of his career channelling the grit and glower of ’70s crime cinema (see: Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own The Night ), it’s no surprise to find that James Gray’s latest movie just as faithfully echoes the same era — albeit in a very different way. In The Lost City Of Z he takes us far from the Scorsese-esque mean streets of the East Coast and drops us deep into the verdant, even meaner murk of a Herzogian wilderness.

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God is the obvious touchpoint, with its own doomed quest to find a jungle-swallowed city. As in Herzog’s unsettling 1972 epic, Gray’s shadowy jungle is an amoral, brutal and sometimes surreal force to be warily respected, rather than some bright, romantic pulp-fiction playground. The Amazon rainforest is a “green desert” where any passing non-indigenous human is little more than a walking buffet for mosquitoes, piranha, jaguars and cannibals. It is a powerful and visceral portrayal of a truly unmerciful landscape.

Somehow simultaneously unnerving and sublime.

Though Major Percy Fawcett is no wild-eyed Aguirre. Known to his contemporaries as “the David Livingstone of the Amazon”, and an inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World , he was one of the last great British explorers — a man who, until he himself became as lost as the city he sought, kept his composure and dignity amid the heat, starvation and occasional deluge of tribal arrows. In Gray’s script (adapted from The New Yorker writer David Grann’s superbly illuminating history) this fascinating character comes with the added baggage of social ostracism; “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” one snooty superior notes. So success as an explorer is not merely a question of satisfying his intrepid nature; as Fawcett says to his boozy aide-de-camp Costin (Robert Pattinson, hidden beneath specs and a bushy beard), “My reputation as a man rests entirely on our success.”

In casting the role, Gray has taken something of a gamble. Charlie Hunnam’s broad-shouldered, laddish swagger seems an odd fit for the rake-thin, ramrod-straight gentleman explorer, who we follow through two decades of life. And while Hunnam largely holds up well under the pressure of his most demanding role yet, he is a less compelling presence during the quieter scenes with Fawcett’s ahead-of-her-time wife Nina (Sienna Miller, underused in yet another sidelined-spouse role) and, later, his grown-up son Jack (Tom Holland). He is a man for hacking at the tangled undergrowth or, in a dramatic mid-film diversion, scrambling across the barbed-wire and chlorine-gas plagued no-man’s land of the Somme.

Which isn’t to place the blame for the film’s lapses in momentum squarely at Hunnam’s door. Gray’s three-act/three-expedition structure necessitates in-between-adventure stretches which, while highlighting Fawcett’s listlessness and impatience to get back to finding Z, may also test your own patience a little and make the 141-minute running time feel significantly longer.

It’s a difficult story to end, too, its appeal to Grann being its status as one of modern history’s great unsolved mysteries. But here Gray excels, going out on an oblique but elegant note that is somehow simultaneously unnerving and sublime.

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The lost city of z.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 3 Reviews
Kids Say 5 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Dense, intelligent, mature, yet measured adventure drama.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 14+?

Arrows pierce a man's chest. Bloody wounds. Blood in water. Guns and shootin

Topless native women. Brief, mild innuendo.

A use of "goddamn," and a use of "bastard."

Drinking from flasks. Smoking. A character's (unseen) father is said to have

Any Positive Content?

Characters go up against impossible odds to find something that may or may not e

The main character is brave, resilient, and persistent; he perseveres, unwilling

Violence & Scariness

Arrows pierce a man's chest. Bloody wounds. Blood in water. Guns and shooting. Fighting. Hunting sequences, animals shot. Men falling from horses. Scars. Man vomits.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinking from flasks. Smoking. A character's (unseen) father is said to have been a drinker and a gambler, having disgraced the family name.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Characters go up against impossible odds to find something that may or may not exist. Raises questions around the idea of when to quit/not to quit when pursuing something that may never be accomplished.

Positive Role Models

The main character is brave, resilient, and persistent; he perseveres, unwilling to give up in his quest. But he sacrifices many things along the way, including watching his family grow up and grow old and missing out on helping to raise his children.

Parents need to know that The Lost City of Z is a a fact-based historical adventure/drama about the search for a lost Amazonian city. Originally rated R but edited to get a PG-13, the movie has sporadic but strong violence, including guns and shooting, bloody wounds, hunting sequences (with animals killed), arrows piercing a man's chest, fighting, and other iffy images. Topless women native to the Amazon are shown, and there's brief mild innuendo. Language includes "goddamn" and "bastard." Characters occasionally drink from flasks and smoke, and one character's father is described as a drinker and a gambler who ruined the family name. Even though it might come across as an exciting jungle adventure, the movie is slow, dense, and mature, and it's unlikely to excite many teens. Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson co-star; the movie is based on the book by David Grann. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (3)
Kids say (5)

Based on 3 parent reviews

THIS SHOULD BE RATED R

Beware - this is a bit grim, what's the story.

In THE LOST CITY OF Z, which is based on a true story (covered in the non-fiction book by David Grann), Percy Fawcett ( Charlie Hunnam ) is military man who becomes interested in finding an ancient lost city hidden in the Amazon. Accompanied by Corporal Henry Costin ( Robert Pattinson ), Fawcett finds his first trip dangerous -- they face starvation, deadly natives, and vicious wildlife -- but it reveals significant clues. The second trip is hindered by the presence of James Murray ( Angus Macfadyen ), who's unequipped to handle the rigors of the jungle, uses up extra provisions, and endangers the mission. The third trip Fawcett makes with his son ( Tom Holland ), and the outcome is a mystery.

Is It Any Good?

James Gray makes intelligent, good-looking, grown-up movies that are admirable but somehow rather reserved; this real-life adventure tale is a more sprawling work, but the result is similar. Gray ( We Own the Night , Two Lovers , The Immigrant ) is steeped in the cinema of the 1970s, and The Lost City of Z feels more like Werner Herzog 's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) than it does Raiders of the Lost Ark . Yet it lacks Aguirre 's madness; it's missing the kind of enthusiasm or obsession that might help drive a movie like this.

But there's no denying that it's expertly made. The Amazon footage is harrowing and realistic; you can feel the bugs buzzing around, as well as the supreme heat, humidity, and exhaustion. The images have a high-class, measured realism and complexity of character; no one here is merely a hero or a villain, not even Macfadyen's Murray, whose scenes are the film's most primal and emotional ones (you really want him to suffer for his crimes). This movie requires a little bit of thinking and involvement, but it's worth the effort.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Lost City of Z 's violence . How much is shown vs. not shown? Which has more impact? Why? Does exposure to violent media make kids more aggressive?

How does the movie handle drinking and smoking ? Are there consequences for substance use? Why is that important?

How familiar were you with Percy Fawcett? What do you think really happened? Does the movie make you want to look into the story further?

What seems more important: a search for a lost city or spending time with your family? How does the movie answer this question?

The movie is deliberately more thoughtful and less exciting than an Indiana Jones-type adventure. Did you like it more or less?

Movie Details

In theaters : April 14, 2017
On DVD or streaming : July 11, 2017
Cast : Charlie Hunnam , Robert Pattinson , Sienna Miller
Director : James Gray
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studios : Bleecker Street , Amazon Studios
Genre : Drama
Topics : Adventures , History
Character Strengths : Perseverance
Run time : 141 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : violence, disturbing images, brief strong language and some nudity
Last updated : March 6, 2024

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The Lost City Of Z Review

With his last three films, James Gray has established himself as the modern cinephile's director of choice. We Own The Night , Two Lovers , and The Immigrant are each engrossing, poetic, and take a subversive view on plots and films we've seen before, while also avoiding a mainstream audience to keep his fanbase intact.

The Lost City Of Z has the same traits as the above trifecta of films, as James Gray takes on an epic story that harkens back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. To films like The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre and Apocalypse Now , directors like David Lean and John Ford, and titanic themes of obsession, duty, honor, prejudice, and reputation, all of which you can't help but get wrapped up in.

The epic story is that of Perry Fawcett, a British explorer who made several attempts between 1906 and 1925 to find the Lost City Of Z in Brazil, while in between he also fought in the First World War. I'll just leave the overview of the film at that, because any further research you do might hamper your enjoyment of the proceedings.

James Gray immediately feels at home and confident within such a grandiose tale of discovery and exploration, establishing the period, Perry Fawcett and what he's looking to achieve, as well as the family that he has to leave behind to do so, while transporting us from Ireland to London to South America with a smooth, and inviting rhythm. Once in South America the treacherous, life-threatening conditions, as well as the threats from tribes, are underlined, too, but not in the face of the gorgeous greenery and naturalism. This alluring aspect of the film isn't rammed down your throat, instead the serene beauty and quiet of the period and its setting, as well as Gray's patient plotting, subtly grows and grows, and gives The Lost City Of Z a completely different texture and feel to its brash peers.

The Lost City Of Z's cast perform gainfully in the adverse conditions. As Perry Fawcett, Charlie Hunnam does everything required, coming off as ambitious, naïve, heroic, out of his depth, and wide-eyed, while still keeping the character grounded. Robert Pattinson is ruggedly unrecognizable as Corporal Henry Costin, while Sienna Miller and Tom Holland chime in with unspectacular support, but the entire cast lacks a combined sparkle or individual charisma to really standout or be memorable.

But for all the films positives, its paced and structured in such a fractured manner that you repeatedly feel yourself being yanked out of your enjoyment like a baby being awakened from its nap. It also doesn't help that both Perry Fawcett's desire to find the titular vanished metropolis and why he's so adamant he can find it aren't emphatically enough established, too. And while there's enough beauty, peacefulness, and detail in the locale, its inhabitants, and the plight of the explorers to keep you intrigued for the most part, its unseemly aimlessness keeps you at arms length.

The Lost City Of Z's positives more than outweigh its negatives, though. Refreshingly ambitious, sumptuously shot, and boasting a beguiling premise, The Lost City Of Z really does have all the hallmarks of a cult classic, and it will undoubtedly grow to be more and more appreciated over time, it's just too disjointed and frustrating to fully savor in the moment.

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‘The Lost City of Z’ Review: Charlie Hunnam Explores the Amazon in Stirring Saga

James Gray taps into deeper levels of artistry with this stirring look at the travels of early-20th-century explorer Percival Fawcett

“The Lost City of Z” is a movie about the glory of perseverance, not the cost of it. Director James Gray held on to the idea of making a film of David Grann ‘s 2009 book of the same title with a fervor that matches the hero of Grann’s non-fiction narrative, a British explorer named Percival Fawcett who spent the early parts of the 20th century searching for a lost Amazonian city. Gray suffered through several setbacks with financing of this project until he finally got the money he needed and set out to shoot in the jungle on 35mm film.

There is nothing at all negative or even ambivalent about Gray’s portrayal of Fawcett ( Charlie Hunnam ), his wife Nina ( Sienna Miller ), or other members of the expeditions like Henry Costin ( Robert Pattinson ) and Fawcett’s own son Jack (Tom Holland, “Captain America: Civil War”). Gray seems to find these people marvelous and admirable, and he shoots them attentively and adoringly so that we can get to love them just as much as he clearly does.

Most directors would have approached “The Lost City of Z” in one of two ways: Fawcett could have been seen as a flawed dreamer who brought pain to both his family and others around him, or he could have been brightly viewed as a heroic man with a mission, but the subtle Gray has carefully worked out a rather distant yet sensual middle ground between these two obvious choices.

Gray has always been a methodical, highly cautious director — and that caution of his has led to exquisite films like “We Own the Night” and “Two Lovers” — but his work was beginning to seem a bit too small or too gloomily constricted. “The Lost City of Z” is an attempt at an entirely different kind of film for Gray, and the results are revelatory and expansive while also true to his own complicated creative character.

“The Lost City of Z” is not a conventional or crowd-pleasing sort of movie. It runs 140 minutes, and it often moves like a lusciously tempting fantasy of freedom or like a hazy memory connected by either old-fashioned dissolves or hard cuts between images to represent fleet-footed thoughts. Gray isn’t afraid to let the narrative drift in a daydreaming sort of way to reflect the state of mind of his characters. Fawcett’s search for a lost city in the Amazon jungle might have been just a metaphor for filming this difficult project, but Gray is after bigger game here.

Gray takes chances with the structure of this picture, discretely moving back and forth in time and not bothering with forward momentum or even any particularly “dramatic” scenes, for Gray does not have the instincts of a dramatist but rather the skillset of a musician or a painter working with film. Since Fawcett is a born explorer, it often feels as if Gray himself were exploring how he could tell this story, and he never wants to settle on anything obvious.

In Gray’s previous movies, men and women were shown as trapped by their family life and by their milieu, but “The Lost City of Z” is about people doing anything they can to escape and transcend their environments. What’s so intoxicating about this film is that Gray convincingly suggests that a really spirited person of either gender can find ways to make sure that their reach can exceed their grasp.

A particular achievement here is Gray’s treatment of Fawcett’s wife Nina. In countless movies, we watch a male lead driving the plot while his wife or girlfriend sits at home and alternates between smiling patiently and complaining impotently. As filmed by Gray and played by Miller, Nina Fawcett is an adventurous woman herself and a textured rebuke to all those “wife at home” roles.

Nina aids her husband and tries to be his partner in the search for the lost city whenever she can, and she even wants to go along with him on one of the expeditions, but while Fawcett is seen as a progressive in some areas, he’s definitely a man of his time when it comes to how he views his wife.

“You’re real,” Nina says quietly at one point, lightly touching her husband’s handsome head as if his stay at home were just a mirage. In the last section of “The Lost City of Z,” when Fawcett has gone off one more time with their son Jack to search for the lost city, Miller’s Nina reaches a point of spiritual exaltation that matches up exactly with what we see of her husband. Gray makes us feel that these two people were ideally suited to each other.

The last shot of Gray’s “The Immigrant” was so lyrically expressive of the fates of his characters that it was indelible, but he tops himself with the last shot of “The Lost City of Z,” which surprisingly blends knock-out visual beauty, tender feminism, overall personal inter-connectedness, and something else, too, something yearning and just out of reach. (“To look for what is beautiful is its own reward,” Nina says toward the end of this film.)

“The Lost City of Z” feels like a clear artistic advance for Gray, who proves himself here as one of our finest and most distinctive living filmmakers.

[powergridprofile powerrank=”2536″ node=”247245″ type=”person” path=”http://powergrid.thewrap.com/person/charlie-hunnam” title=”Charlie Hunnam” image=”charlie_hunnam”]

Entertainment
The True Story Behind <i>The Lost City of Z</i>

The True Story Behind The Lost City of Z

Warning: spoilers for The Lost City of Z follow.

Since he disappeared in the Brazilian jungle in 1925, the British explorer Percy Fawcett has inspired plays, comic books, Hollywood movies and even an Indiana Jones novel. Eighty years later, Fawcett’s search for a lost ancient city which he dubbed “Z” inspired the journalist David Grann to follow in his footsteps. Grann recounted the story of Fawcett’s life, in parallel with his own journey to learn about it, first in the New Yorker and then in a book, The Lost City of Z , which is now the basis of a movie of the same name, hitting theaters April 14.

The film, which stars Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, Sienna Miller as his wife Nina, Tom Holland (a.k.a. Spider-Man ) as their eldest son Jack and Robert Pattinson as fellow explorer Henry Costin, hews close to Grann’s book. While it consolidates many of his experiences, it paints a portrait of a man teetering on the brink of obsession, with director James Gray offering his own interpretation of the explorer’s ambiguous fate.

Here’s how the movie’s version compares to the way Fawcett’s life and fateful journey really unfolded.

Fact: Fawcett was at a social disadvantage because his father had damaged the family name.

The movie Fawcett’s preoccupation with social advancement draws from the real Fawcett’s impaired standing. His father, Captain Edward Boyd Fawcett, began his life a Victorian aristocrat but squandered away the family’s wealth as he struggled with alcoholism. The family scrounged up enough to send the younger Fawcett to elite schools and the Royal Military Academy. But later in his life, any desire for status would be eclipsed by Fawcett’s fixation on finding Z, which would leave his own family destitute.

MORE Review: James Gray’s Resplendent Lost City of Z Speaks to the Explorer in All of Us

Mostly fact: The Royal Geographical Society summoned Fawcett out of the blue for a mission to Bolivia in 1906.

Though the RGS did tap Fawcett for a South American voyage, it didn’t happen as unexpectedly as the film suggests. Fawcett first visited the institution in 1900 and spent a year training there before his first mission. Whereas the movie presents Fawcett as somewhat reluctant to become an explorer — he says he hoped to rectify his undecorated uniform with some military action — the real Fawcett had been eager to work as an explorer since he was stationed in the British colony of Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka. In pursuit of rumored treasure there, he had found the ruins of an ancient temple and knew then that he wanted to forge a path like those of Richard Francis Burton and David Livingstone.

Fact: Fawcett returned to the Amazon many times between his first and last expedition.

As the movie depicts, Fawcett’s first expedition to the Amazon was a mapmaking mission. With the auto industry gaining steam, demand for rubber boomed, and border disputes between Bolivia, Brazil and Peru threatened to erupt in a violent conflagration. The countries summoned England as an independent arbiter. During this and future trips, rumors of a lost civilization, which Fawcett heard first from Indians and later read about in conquistadors’ accounts, struck him as increasingly possible.

Much like in the movie, during one trip in 1910, Fawcett’s group was traveling by boat when they were suddenly inundated with a barrage of poisonous spears. After taking cover, they began to sing “Soldiers of the Queen” as Fawcett waved a handkerchief and walked toward the shore to indicate friendship. The tribe, the Guarayos, invited the men to stay as guests. While there, Fawcett witnessed their advanced fishing methods. Later, when he met the Echoja tribe, he was impressed by their herbal medicines and their cultivation of floodplains to grow crops in the middle of the jungle. These observations felt like mounting proof that a remarkable ancient city might once have flourished.

Fact: Nina Fawcett was an independent woman who always hoped her husband would allow her to join him on his expeditions.

Well-educated, insatiably curious and a speaker of multiple languages, Nina supported her husband’s missions from afar not only by raising their three children but by defending his reputation from his many detractors. But she also longed to join him. An advocate for gender equality, she argued that she was in good health and knew how to navigate by the stars. Although she did visit her husband in South America once, he always refused her requests to join in his dangerous expeditions.

Partly fiction: Fawcett fought against paternalistic and racist views of Indians.

The movie’s Fawcett rails against his colleagues’ attitudes toward Indians, which he perceived as alternately paternalistic and racist. He even does so to a jeering crowd of RGS members, in a scene that appears to be fabricated. In reality, Fawcett’s views were more complicated. He did advocate nonviolence toward Indians and disapproved of intervention with their way of life. He learned their languages and argued that the inhabitants of his “lost city” would have been capable of scientific feats on par with those of Europeans at the time. But he also referred to them as “ape-like,” “jolly children,” and he believed any advanced civilization in the Amazon must have had origins in European society.

Fact: Fawcett was consumed by the fear that a rival might beat him to Z.

In the movie, Fawcett tells his son Jack that he fears Americans will get to Z first, killing Indians along the way. In fact, this fear originated long before that conversation and stemmed from a combination of his concern for the Indians’ safety and his own mighty ego. His main rival was the American doctor and explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice, who had something Fawcett lacked: money. When Rice mounted an expedition in 1924, as Fawcett struggled to fund what would be his last, it was with the latest gadgets, equipment and aircraft. Fawcett’s expedition, once he finally funded it, would cost less than the price of a single one of his rival’s radios. Rice had also, to Fawcett’s anger, once killed a group of Yanomami Indians who were threatening his men, and had reportedly brought bombs on his present expedition to scare away cannibal tribes.

Fact: Fawcett often turned to psychics, mediums and the occult for guidance.

In the movie, Fawcett consults a psychic while on the battlefield in France during World War I. While Grann doesn’t write of this specific instance, he does detail the explorer’s prolonged interest in the occult. When he was stationed in Ceylon, Fawcett became acquainted with a Russian psychic named Madame Blavatsky, who would eventually amass followers around the globe. He was rumored to have used a ouija board to help him make strategic decisions during the war and to communicate with his mother during a seance. He especially turned to the spiritual world during the early 1920s, when he felt abandoned by the scientific establishment. Where they doubted his claims, spiritualists confirmed them.

Fact: After one expedition, the polar explorer James Murray accused Fawcett of attempted murder.

Fawcett kept an inhuman pace as he trekked through treacherous terrain and had little patience for those who couldn’t keep up. One companion on his 1911 expedition to explore the Heath River, the scientist James Murray (played in the movie by Agnus Macfayden), was out of shape and contemptuous of taking orders of Fawcett. As the movie depicts, his failure to keep pace in conjunction with his many ailments posed a threat to the entire group, so Fawcett arranged to have him carried out of the jungle. Back in England after the expedition, Murray accused the explorer of leaving him for dead. While the RGS didn’t believe Fawcett was guilty, neither did they want a scandal, so they asked Fawcett to apologize. It’s unclear whether he did, but he did reconcile with the Society. Murray, meanwhile, disappeared on an Arctic expedition in 1913.

Mostly fact: Percy Fawcett and his son Jack set out on their expedition in 1925 and disappeared five months later.

In the movie, Fawcett and his 21-year-old son set out together for Z. In reality, they had a third British companion, Jack’s best friend Raleigh Rimmell. Whereas the film’s Jack has to persuade his father to return to the jungle, Fawcett was the one who enlisted his eager son for a journey. Because they had sold the rights to the journey to a consortium of North American newspapers, the trio had 40 million readers following along. The three men set out from Cuiabá, Brazil, on April 20, 1925 and sent dispatches for five months before going dark. The last letter Fawcett wrote to his wife read, “You need have no fear of any failure.”

Possibly fact, possibly fiction: The explorers were captured by hostile Indians.

While the film is ambiguous about their fate, it suggests that the men were captured by Indians, leaving the audience to imagine the rest. Grann posits a theory based on his own meeting with the Kalapalo Indians, who were at one time accused of killing the explorers. In 1951, the Kalapalos had offered up a skeleton which they said belonged to Fawcett — but which actually belonged to the grandfather of the chief who hosted Grann — in order to prevent more white people from coming into their territory to search for the men. LIFE magazine declared the bones the “final chapter in 25-year-old search.” But what actually happened, according to their oral history, was that the Kalapalos gave the men food and warned them not to venture further, because hostile tribes would surely kill them. The men continued on, ignoring their warnings. “People always say the Kalapalos killed the Englishmen,” the Kalapalo chief told Grann.” But we did not. We tried to save them.”

Fact: Nina never gave up on finding her husband and son, and many rescue missions were mounted to find them.

Nina spent the rest of her life believing that her husband and son were still alive. Thousands volunteered for recovery missions, and upwards of 100 people died during attempts to rescue them, or at least discover their fate. Rumors flew freely — they had “gone native,” they had been killed by Indians, that Jack had a son with an Indian woman. A 17-year-old boy named Dulipé, suspected to be Fawcett’s grandson, was pulled from the jungle and photographed for LIFE, before it was determined that he was an Indian with albinism. In 1996, an expedition of Brazilian scientists searching for clues was captured by Indians before negotiating its way out of the jungle.

Bonus: Was there a lost city, after all?

In attempting to retrace Fawcett’s steps, Grann ended up in a Kuikuro Village where University of Florida archaeologist Michael Heckenberger was living. Heckenberger showed Grann a dip in the earth that had once been part of a large concentric circle of moats. The moats had surrounded one of 20 pre-Columbian settlements that thrived between the ninth and seventeenth centuries. Connected by roads and causeways which were planned at right angles, according to the four cardinal directions, the settlements had mostly decomposed because they had been constructed with organic materials. But the cities were built, Heckenberger told Grann, with “a sense of engineering and mathematics that rivaled anything that was happening in much of Europe at the time.”

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FEATURETTE: Author David Grann

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The Lost City of Z - Official Trailer

Based on author David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, The Lost City of Z tells the incredible true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), who journeys into the Amazon at the dawn of the 20th century and discovers evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization that may have once inhabited the region. Despite being ridiculed by the scientific establishment who regard indigenous populations as “savages,” the determined Fawcett — supported by his devoted wife (Sienna Miller), son (Tom Holland) and aide-de-camp (Robert Pattinson) — returns time and again to his beloved jungle in an attempt to prove his case, culminating in his mysterious disappearance in 1925. An epically scaled tale of courage and passion, told in writer/director James Gray’s classic filmmaking style, The Lost City of Z is a stirring tribute to the exploratory spirit and a conflicted adventurer driven to the verge of obsession.

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The Lost City of Z movie review (2017)
April 14, 2017. 6 min read. "The Lost City of Z" is about an Englishman who's determined to find an ancient city in the Brazilian jungle. But it's really about what happens when you get older and realize that your youthful dreams haven't come true yet: you either ratchet expectations back a bit, or double down and charge harder in the ...
The Lost City of Z
Rated: A Jul 1, 2024 Full Review Colin Stacy Vague Visages It cannot be understated: The Lost City of Z is a revelation. Dec 6, 2023 Full Review Read all reviews Audience Reviews
The Lost City of Z Review: A Masterpiece in the Amazon
Chris Cabin reviews The Lost City of Z, the new adventure film by James Gray, in which Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland head to the Amazon.
The Lost City of Z
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 4, 2024. Perhaps it's the film's jungle setting that matches James Gray's meandering tone; the film deals with doubt and uncertainty, and the sense of ...
Review: Hearts of Darkness and Light in 'The Lost City of Z'
April 13, 2017. In "The Lost City of Z," a lush, melancholic story of discovery and mystery, a mesmerizing Charlie Hunnam plays a British adventurer in the Amazon who is consumed by "all the ...
The Lost City of Z Review
Gorgeous, Enthralling. The Lost City of Z. Is One of 2017's Best Movies. James Gray ascends to a new filmmaking plane with this stunning epic. A purveyor of earnest, New York-set chamber dramas ...
The Lost City of Z (2016)
The Lost City of Z: Directed by James Gray. With Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland. A true-life drama, centering on British explorer Major Percival Fawcett, who disappeared whilst searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s.
The Lost City of Z Is a Mysterious, Enthralling Masterpiece
The Lost City of Z is a miraculous movie, at once moving, intimidating, and gorgeous to behold. It's a tale of colonial exploration that's aware of the sins of the past, and a portrait of a ...
Movie Review: The Lost City of Z
The Lost City of Z (ed) isn't as expansive as you might initially wish but still pulls you in and along. Fawcett's aide-de-camp, Henry Costin, is played by Robert Pattinson behind a full beard ...
The Lost City of Z Review
The Lost City of Z, with Charlie Hunnam and Tom Holland, is a wonderful throwback epic with modern insights about the danger in discovery. There is a feral beauty to the exotic locations the ...
The Lost City of Z Review
Verdict. The Lost City of Z marks yet another impressive addition to director James Gray's growing filmography. Featuring a career-best lead performance from Charlie Hunnam and some truly awe ...
The Lost City of Z Review
The new film both written and directed by James Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant), The Lost City of Z adapts David Grann's 2009 non-fiction bestseller of the same name, into an old-fashioned cinematic journey into the heart of the jungle (both literal and figurative, here).Gray's adaptation brings the early 20th century world and Percy Fawcett's story to life in a steadily-paced manner that ...
'The Lost City Of Z' Review: James Gray Journeys To The Jungle And
In effect, The Lost City of Z is a balance between a deliberate character study and a David Lean-esque epic that demands to be seen on the big screen. Hunnam's performance plus the beautiful ...
Review: 'The Lost City of Z' is a mesmerizing adventure
Review: 'The Lost City of Z' is a mesmerizing adventure. Modest and majestic at once, the films of James Gray patiently burrow their way into the souls of their characters and, maybe, into you. Gray is painterly and exacting — some might say to a fault. But his movies' revelations are complex and contradictory — full of life's ...
The Lost City Of Z Review
141 minutes. Certificate: 15. Original Title: Lost City of Z, The. Having spent much of his career channelling the grit and glower of '70s crime cinema (see: Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own ...
The Lost City of Z Reviews
Negative Reviews. 10. A modern masterclass that blends history, fiction and the quest for personal achievement into a delicately crafted 2 and a half hour journey through time. Report. 10. A marvellous epic that unexpectedly goes more for an emotional, resonant introspective view of human's psychology than an adventure flick.
The Lost City of Z Movie Review
Parents need to know that The Lost City of Z is a a fact-based historical adventure/drama about the search for a lost Amazonian city. Originally rated R but edited to get a PG-13, the movie has sporadic but strong violence, including guns and shooting, bloody wounds, hunting sequences (with animals killed),….
The Lost City Of Z Review
The Lost City Of Z has the same traits as the above trifecta of films, as James Gray takes on an epic story that harkens back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. To films like The Treasure Of The ...
'The Lost City of Z' review: a man's obsessive jungle quest
Movie Review ★★★ 'The Lost City of Z,' with Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland. Written and directed by James Gray, based on a book by David Grann. 140 minutes ...
'The Lost City of Z' Review: Charlie Hunnam Explores the ...
"The Lost City of Z" is a movie about the glory of perseverance, not the cost of it. Director James Gray held on to the idea of making a film of David Grann's 2009 book of the same title ...
The Lost City of Z (film)
The Lost City of Z is a 2016 American epic biographical adventure drama film written and directed by James Gray, based on the 2009 book of the same name by David Grann. [4] It portrays British explorer Percy Fawcett, who was sent to Brazil and made several attempts to find a supposed ancient lost city in the Amazon. [5] It stars Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett; [6] Robert Pattinson as his fellow ...
The Lost City of Z: True Story Behind the Movie
Mostly fact: Percy Fawcett and his son Jack set out on their expedition in 1925 and disappeared five months later. In the movie, Fawcett and his 21-year-old son set out together for Z. In reality ...
The Lost City Of Z
Based on author David Grann's nonfiction bestseller, The Lost City of Z tells the incredible true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), who journeys into the Amazon at the dawn of the 20th century and discovers evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization that may have once inhabited the region. Despite being ridiculed by the scientific establishment who regard ...
The Lost City of Z (book)
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a non-fiction book by American author David Grann.Published in 2009, the book recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest while looking for the ancient "Lost City of Z".In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he ...
The Lost City of Z
The Lost City of Z - James Gray - critique. L'enfer vert. Le 30 janvier 2021. En gardant tout son génie intact, James Gray se réapproprie un genre tombé en désuétude pour nous offrir le ...
Himalaya Horror
After a new radioactive element is found that acts as a defense against the atomic bomb, warmongers try to find it.Colorized version https://youtu.be/_z_Yb8x...

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