It really existed (and maybe still does), and it haunts him. But the slave tells Fawcett about an ancient city that no white man has ever seen, and during a hike through the jungle, when Fawcett finds faces carved into trees and sophisticated pieces of tribal pottery, he decides that the promise of that lost civilization is no Atlantis/El Dorado myth.
#Lost city of zed movie#
For about 20 minutes, the movie suggests “Apocalypse Now” redone as a “Masterpiece Theatre” episode. Traveling up the Amazon on a raft along with his aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson, amusingly unrecognizable in a beard and spectacles that make him look he’s getting ready to star in “The Georges Bizet Story”), and a motley crew of assistants, including one South American slave, Willis (the superb Johann Myers), they are drifters in a hostile land, ducking showers of tribal arrows, subjected to starvation and disease. He’s promised that if he takes this mapping assignment and succeeds, he’ll be rewarded with a new status. The British are driven by one motive (they want to protect their investments in the region’s rubber plantations), and Fawcett, an ambitious young major who has never seen combat, has a selfish priority of his own: His father was a drunk and a gambler, and the disgrace of that legacy has barred his entrance to the upper echelons of British military society. Fawcett starts off getting an assignment from hell by the British Army: In 1906, he is ordered to set sail for the jungles of Bolivia, where he’s to map out the border between that country and Brazil, a murky divide that’s leading to war. The movie was written and directed by James Gray, adapting David Grann’s 2009 nonfiction account of Fawcett and his expeditions, and Gray doesn’t shape Fawcett’s life into an overly tidy narrative he lets it wind and sprawl. He’s a stiff-upper-lip adventurer-saint, enlightened in his thinking, driven by a personal quest that’s really a desire to heighten the spirit of mankind. But in “ The Lost City of Z,” set within the British Empire during the early decades of the 20th century, the English explorer Percy Fawcett ( Charlie Hunnam) spends years seeking out the natives of the Amazonian jungle - and the mystery behind them - with a sense of purpose that is never less than high and mighty, progressive and noble. His colonial malevolence was echoed in two landmark films of the ’70s: “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” in which Klaus Kinski’s bug-eyed, raving conquistador led a jungle odyssey into madness, and “Apocalypse Now,” in which Martin Sheen’s burnt-out assassin discovered, in Marlon Brando, a different kind of Kurtz - a philosopher of war’s evil, a leader who had gone “insane” only because he was the only one who saw Vietnam with utter clarity.
Kurtz, the fabled central figure in “Heart of Darkness,” entered a primitive jungle world and made himself over into its homicidal master.
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