Barring contact with the outside world, the idea didn't make much sense to me, especially when he would occasionally get a response. The only disconnect in the story for me was when Fawcett encountered various tribes and attempted the use of Spanish to address the natives as 'amigos'. Though that occurred over a span of twenty years, the man never lost his innate desire to find out the truth about a possible 'lost city' that might have existed deep in the jungle, pre-dating the arrival of white men who would doubt the ability of savages to create a civilization. What fascinates me about Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is that he was determined to return to the Amazon time and again following the first expedition to delineate the border between Bolivia and Brazil. Quite coincidentally, the silent film version of 'The Lost World' was released in 1925, the same year Fawcett went missing with his son in The Amazon. Fawcett's memoirs, which were posthumously published, spoke of the possibility of 'monsters from the dawn of man's existence', an idea taken to heart by Doyle when he came up with his science-fiction novel titled 'The Lost World'. They in fact were good friends, and Doyle was present at the Royal Geographical Society lecture of February 13th, 1911, the one in which Fawcett described his expedition to Huanchaca Plateau in Bolivia. Reading some of the trivia notes for the picture here on IMDb, I was intrigued by the fact that the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his Professor Challenger character on that of Percy Fawcett. That makes it more interesting in retrospect. This movie requires a little bit of thinking and involvement, but it's worth the effort.While watching, I had no idea the film was based on a true story. 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). The Amazon footage is harrowing and realistic you can feel the bugs buzzing around, as well as the supreme heat, humidity, and exhaustion. Yet it lacks Aguirre's madness it's missing the kind of enthusiasm or obsession that might help drive a movie like this.īut there's no denying that it's expertly made.

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. 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.

The lost city of z book review