Die versunkene Stadt Z

I was so hyped for this movie after I read the book. What a let down , this should have been a throwback to the the classic Hollywood epics of the past. Instead it's kind of a bore, scenes set in jungle are amazing but there are too many slow drawn out parts that deal with drama back in civilization.

The acting by Hunnam is mediocre at best, Sienna Miller gives a great performance too bad she's not in more of the movie.

Overall it's not horrible but it's also just average

Screenplay jumps from one segment of Fawcett's life to another, without a lot of connexion.

I didn't really object to this film's two and a half hours long run time, I just wish more time would have been spent in the jungles, searching for the lost city, because when they're in the jungles, the film works well, as unseen natives launch arrows at them, and their rocky trip through some rapids, and the film is well worth watching for those scenes. More of the screenstory should have dealt with this, as well as the jungle natives themselves.

Instead, the first fifteen minutes are unrelated hunting stories, and it later veers off into feminist ramblings for one lengthy scene, and a completely out of place, and needless sequence on a WWI battlefield, which seems to occupy about fifteen minutes of the run time as well, and for what purpose? It seems like the filmmakers had abandoned the premise of searching for a lost city, and padded the plot out with these scenes, and as a result, the search for a lost city only makes up about 40% of the movie.

There are occasional questions of whether the explorers are more savage than the natives, but even that doesn't seem to go anywhere, as the film will quickly go off into a different direction.

This is (or should be, anyway) a film where its setting and location should become a character in its own right (like the jungles in Predator, or the building in Die Hard, or the hotel in The Shining) but we see so little of it that it could just simply be an overgrown section of land in Hawai'i.

It's one of those labor of loves it seems as the film felt like it was more interested in making an artistic narrative than it was about making money. I can respect that, but it was a boring movie for that reason.

The Lost city of Z is about a British explorer named Percy Fawcett who while on a survey mission in the amazon discovers evidence that the "savages" once had a civilization the might even be older than the one he came from and spends his life trying to find it.

I loved Charlie Hunnam in it. Hands down, his most grown up acting performance, and really made Fawcett a compelling man to follow. In fact the whole cast was impressive with Sienna Miller as Fawcett's wife and Robert Patterson who I totally did not recognize under the bread as Fawcett's most trusted companion on his trips. Tom Holland is also in the movie as Fawcett's oldest son who joins him on his last journey to the amazon. Other people gave great performances, but these are the ones I knew by name, making it a pretty stellar cast for me.

While this movie does such a great job making Fawcett's life look fascinating,following him through his time with the army to his time as an explorer, I must admit that the slow burn of the narrative almost put me to sleep. It reminds me of another project Brad Pitt (who produced the movie) was evolved in, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Though the Lost City of Z is not as painfully slow (Notice the tile is half that of the Jesse James movie), the combination of the quiet tone and it's speed was not something I wanted to sit in a movie theater and watch. It's not that the movie is long, it's that it feels long, and it feels like something that the movie does on purpose.

I feel like the movie tries to gives us the realest accounts of a man's life as they can and I can respect that, but man, the two hours and thirty minutes this film comes in at was not easy at all to get through. That's just my warning.

http://cinemagardens.com

An American biographical adventure; A story about a man who journeys into the Amazon at the dawn of the 20th century aiming for a city he called 'Z' and discovers evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization that may have once inhabited the region. It's a film that resembles, in style, exploration film epics of the mid-20th century. Charlie Hunnam gives a well measured performance as the British geographer, Army Major, and explorer Percy Fawcett. The story centres on passion and determination and obsession and escape but also the losses suffered by leaving home - his growing family and dutiful wife - in service of fantastical dreams. It is a biopic by numbers of a troublesome topic because Fawcett's history has many critics. Nonetheless, it is a stately adventure despite the slow pacing.

That the movie succeeds is a credit to Hunnam, who comes of age both literally and figuratively in this movie with a performance of great humility, charm, and grit. A far cry from his breakout role as a motorcycle gang leader, and an even further cry from his awkward performance in Guy Ritchie's unique (and hopefully never-to-be-repeated) view of young King Arthur as a slum thug.

Props to audiences worldwide who are connecting with a 2 hour and 20 minute opus that is as far from the new Transformers attempt as the earth is from the moon. Shows that quality film-making will always find an audience.

Would have been nice if the script were historically accurate but perhaps that is asking too much.

Ironically, because of the internet, the amount of solid new archaeological evidence being released each 24 hours in today's world would be the equivalent of ten years of time in Fawcett's era. In particular, I am referring to the material of late which suggests lost civilizations submerged in both the Atlantic and the Pacific over 12,000 years ago (see Graham Hancock's lectures for more, most free on Youtube) would explain how Brazil, centered between the two, could indeed have hosted a "lost city" which, thousands of years ago, entertained guests from both realms.

Finally -- for hard-core history buffs only -- the written diagrams preserved even today in the Archives of Rio de Janeiro ("Folio #512") which constitute the last known "communication" from the ACTUAL final, ill-fated, Fawcett expedition were discredited because "experts" of the day claimed they contained elements of different language roots, not one root, and hence "must" be fake. However, if indeed the area was a centerpoint between two now-lost civilizations originating in two different oceans, the multiple language roots would be expected and natural, and not an indication of fraud. ((Designated "IMDb Top Reviewer." Please check out my list "167+ Nearly-Perfect Movies (with the occasional Anime or TV miniseries) you can/should see again and again (1932 to the present))