In The Lost Lands (2025)

By: Mike Ward on Friday, March 07

R Running Time: 100 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

  • Despite the widespread criticism of his movies, Paul W.S. Anderson has a loyal following of devotees who are waiting to see his latest effort.

  • May interest those who enjoy medieval-style fantasies, with elements of steampunk, greenscreen backdrops, and CGI monsters, beasts, and explosions.

  • Fans of George R.R. Martin’s writing may be familiar with the 1982 short story this is based on.

NO

  • In the Lost Lands is amateurish, poorly made, and resembles the work of (in)famous director, Uwe Boll, at times.

  • So dense in its own exposition and mythology, you can’t even laugh at how badly conceived this whole thing is because it takes itself soooooo seriously.

  • Feels like a straight-to-video release from the 1990s.


OUR REVIEW

For those wanting a movie with witches, bounty hunters, shapeshifters, werewolf zombie creatures, magic and sorcery, lots of robes, a two-headed snake that lives in a gun barrel, and seems to rip off countless other, more well-known sci-fi/fantasy films, then do we have the movie for you!

In the Lost Lands is the latest debacle from Paul W.S. Anderson, a filmmaker who casts his wife, Milla Jovovich, in all of his films and whose skills have declined to that of disgraced B-movie director Uwe Boll. This silly, pointless medieval fantasy finds Jovovich paired with Dave Bautista, who somehow finds himself mumbling through a nonsense screenplay adapted from a short story by George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”).

In the 1990s, movies like In the Lost Lands were video store staples, the kind of straight-to-video dreck that people would rent, watch, and hate, only to then try to forget they spent money on it. Among the most visually off-putting films in recent memory, many scenes exist in the darkest of night (likely masking a lot of the visual effects work), with swatches of light showing us faces and expressions. Other scenes are awkwardly set against a green screen, something of an Anderson staple. When we do have daytime shots, those moments look like they come from a dated, old video game (not a compliment). In other moments, it feels like the crew ran out and shot scenes on discarded set pieces from Dune or the recent Mad Max films, while those crews were on break. 

As part of the absurdity, Anderson’s reliance on scattershot storyline elements and details become laughable.

“The Overlord is dying and soon there will be a new day in the city,” croaks a man known as The Patriarch (Fraser James). And then, we smash cut to a man being whipped, tied to gallows, with a random shot of a city on fire as vehicles pass by, to next see a title card that tells us it is “3 Days Until the Full Moon.”

What?!

With her artfully tattooed face (which is never explained), Jovovich plays a sorceress named Gray Alys. Teaming with a bounty hunter named Boyce (Bautista), they band together to fight their way across the City Under the Mountain. Their mission is to serve the request of a Queen (Amara Okereke) who wants to take the powers of a shapeshifter and become a wolf, so she can be with the shape-shifting wolf/man/beast she loves.

Why? Well, because. That’s why.

So, amid Dollar Store-style steampunk sets, dusty terrains, and constantly whispered dialogue, In the Lost Lands documents a journey that is both incomprehensible, frustrating, and makes little sense. I did laugh out loud when Anderson cuts to a map that shows us where his characters are in their journey. However, without world-building and context, this just looks like some app a guy played around with and thought looked cool to put into a movie. It adds nothing. Nothing at all.

Much of the film finds Gray Alys and Boyce stopping somewhere, only to then get immersed in some kind of violent altercation. Maybe they are under attack by CGI skeleton zombies who garble out hypnotic gibberish. Or then they might be in a shootout with dudes who look like rejected extras from Fury Road, with painted crosses on their bald heads and faces who run around like idiots.

All of this is incoherent. The acting is serviceable at best. The costumes laughable and a bit gauche. The Queen wears clothes that show more and more cleavage, while this Patriarch guy shows up in an outfit that resembles something you would find in a skit on “Saturday Night Live” mocking the men of Conclave. And of course, a roving assassin known as The Enforcer (Arly Jover) seems to be rocking aviators like Tom Cruise might wear in a Top Gun movie.

I have no idea what George R.R. Martin was thinking when he wrote this “gem,” but Anderson and his team have certainly turned it into an abomination. Nonsensical, ugly, noisy, and profoundly boring, In the Lost Lands is a wandering, rambling wreck of a movie that is better left lost and forgotten for all involved.

CAST & CREW

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Dave Bautista, Arly Jover, Amara Okereke, Fraser James, Simon Lööf, Deirdre Mullins, Sebastian Stankiewicz, Jacek Dzisiewicz

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Written by: Constantin Werner (screenplay); Paul W.S. Anderson, Constantin Werner (screen story)
Based on the short story “In the Lost Lands” by George R.R. Martin
Release Date: March 7, 2025
Vertical Entertainment