The Lost City of Z (2017)
Directed by James Gray
A true-life drama in the 1920s, centering on British explorer Col. Percy Fawcett, who discovered evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization in the Amazon and disappeared whilst searching for it.
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61 films that influenced The Lost City of Z
What critics say influenced The Lost City of Z
A nod to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is one – a gorgeously odd segment in which Fawcett and his team stumble upon an opera performance deep in the heart of the jungle.
Influence is everywhere but never overwhelms: the splendorous grandeur of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” the striking photography of Vittorio Storraro, the torch-lit nights of “Apocalypse Now,” and one direct homage to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” another picture beset by the madness of obsession (though it’s not the Where’s Waldo of cinema either).
He’s an upstanding Englishman, selfless and heroic, always trying to keep his emotions under wraps, and yet he has that same zealous, obsessive quality that Klaus Kinski brought to his roles as men on mad quests in Aguirre, Wrath Of God or Fitzcarraldo.
Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is even quoted in a luminous scene featuring an opera house in the middle of the jungle.
Though visually resembling Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with hallucinatory night-time jungle scenes recalling Apocalypse Now, Gray’s exploration into a driven individual’s morality more resembles Lawrence of Arabia in tone, and he largely succeeds in managing the same coupling of lush, lyrically expressive imagery with rich emotional resonance.
A jaw-droppingly surreal interlude in which Fawcett stumbles on an opera house in a clearing nods to “Fitzcarraldo,” while a sudden ambush signaled by a deadly rain of arrows is scarcely Gray’s sole invocation of “Apocalypse Now.”
The film’s immaculate design and near-mythic approach to its surroundings bring to mind Apocalypse Now, the obvious comparison given each film’s subject matter, but a relevant one as The Lost City of Z plays like a direct, life-affirming response.
The latest epic period drama from director Gray (The Immigrant) vibrates with the aftershocks of Herzog, Apocalypse Now, and even 2015’s Embrace of the Serpent, and while it never quite escapes those intimidating shadows, it’s an engaging picture nonetheless – and a gorgeous one, its overwhelming images (lensed by the great Darius Khondji) blessed with the grace of a ballet and the period resonance of tintype photos.
Influence is everywhere but never overwhelms: the splendorous grandeur of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” the striking photography of Vittorio Storraro, the torch-lit nights of “Apocalypse Now,” and one direct homage to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” another picture beset by the madness of obsession (though it’s not the Where’s Waldo of cinema either).
It would be far too easy to dismiss The Lost City Of Z as simply mimicking films such as Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (Herzog, 1972), or even Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979); however the film is a genuinely touching story about fighting for what you believe in.
Though visually resembling Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with hallucinatory night-time jungle scenes recalling Apocalypse Now, Gray’s exploration into a driven individual’s morality more resembles Lawrence of Arabia in tone, and he largely succeeds in managing the same coupling of lush, lyrically expressive imagery with rich emotional resonance.
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.
Though visually resembling Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with hallucinatory night-time jungle scenes recalling Apocalypse Now, Gray’s exploration into a driven individual’s morality more resembles Lawrence of Arabia in tone, and he largely succeeds in managing the same coupling of lush, lyrically expressive imagery with rich emotional resonance.
(There is also a cut that clearly references Lawrence Of Arabia .)
James Gray's , based on the best selling book by David Grann, is an epic adventure that brings to mind cinematic classics like Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, and similar stories centered on obsessive men wading through plots rife with thorny racial issues.
For the first act of the picture, Charlie Hunnam barely registers; he doesn't catch the eye the way the stars of "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Fitzcarraldo" immediately did.
It’s a mission fueled by a near-maniacal obsession, with undertones of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Apocalypse Now” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Fitzcarraldo” (though I am not suggesting it measures up to any of those; it doesn’t).
Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now meets Lawrence of Arabia with a taste of The Emerald Forest .
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.
But it's an unusual approach for what half pretends to be a manly, action-adventure saga, the true story that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World .
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 .
Well before his vanishing, legend coiled around him; his reports and speculations may have prompted his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write “The Lost World” (1912), the precursor of “Jurassic Park.”
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Geographically, The Lost City of Z recalls Werner Herzog’s two great Amazonian adventures and that other riverbound jungle journey, Apocalypse Now, but Darius Khondji’s stately, golden-hued imagery constantly brings to mind Vilmos Zsigmond’s lugubrious photography in Heaven’s Gate.
It is a beautiful film with many small wonders and mysteries of its own for the viewer to discover: the candor of the first scenes between the Fawcetts, and the way they give a human face to the era’s social maneuvering; the explorers’ visit to a rubber baron (Franco Nero) who has built a small open-air opera house on his slave plantation; the scene of the boisterous debate at the Royal Geographical Society; the use of Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis Et Chloé to suggest an elusive meaning to the jungle; the sweep and Tolstoy-esque detail of the scenes of social life in mid-1900s Ireland and England, which bring to mind Michael Cimino’s attempts to re-sculpt the New Hollywood auteur cult in the image of 19th century fiction in films like The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate .
Influence is everywhere but never overwhelms: the splendorous grandeur of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” the striking photography of Vittorio Storraro, the torch-lit nights of “Apocalypse Now,” and one direct homage to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” another picture beset by the madness of obsession (though it’s not the Where’s Waldo of cinema either).
Gray’s made no secret of his admiration for Stanley Kubrick, and it would be difficult for well-acquainted viewers not to think of Barry Lyndon in an early ballroom sequence thats adorned with baroque music, ornately dressed extras, and slow zooms — which is after an opening of horse-backing through a wide-open field to hunt and kill a buck now prominently displayed in the ballroom.
Whether it’s Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, there are movies in which the fundamental act of living a life starts to accrue a profound, hypnotic power.
Because he has been “rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors” (the film’s killer line, delivered by Murray Melvin of Barry Lyndon, thematically a forebear through its own depiction of European high society as a finely filigreed social warzone), Fawcett first leaves his wife (Sienna Miller) and children behind in England for a spot of survey work in “Amazonia.”
Unfolding like Coppola’s Apocalypse Now by way of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon , it’s as much an adventure of the mind as of the eye, although cinematographer Darius Khondji outdoes himself with stunning visuals.
“He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors” is how we hear one old duffer—Murray Melvin of Barry Lyndon fame—put it shortly before disappearing behind closed doors with the bona fide gentlemen as tarnished Fawcett looks from across the room in envy, still second-class in spite of the fact that he’s ostensibly being celebrated for his valor in the morning’s hunt.
It’s here, during a meeting with a medium who has been smuggled into a British bunker—in a riveting scene that I have on good authority was modeled after an effect in Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968)—that Fawcett appears suddenly to be transported into the rain forest, an image mirrored, quite literally, in the film’s mysterious closing shot.
It would be far too easy to dismiss The Lost City Of Z as simply mimicking films such as Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (Herzog, 1972), or even Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979); however the film is a genuinely touching story about fighting for what you believe in.
Though visually resembling Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with hallucinatory night-time jungle scenes recalling Apocalypse Now, Gray’s exploration into a driven individual’s morality more resembles Lawrence of Arabia in tone, and he largely succeeds in managing the same coupling of lush, lyrically expressive imagery with rich emotional resonance.
Drawing comparisons to Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Lost City of Z has been crafted by a filmmaker who knows and respects his film history.
When Herzog sent an unhinged Kinski into the jungle for the filming of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), he elegantly illustrated the futility of Human ambition in the face of indifferent Nature.
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Fawcett’s final trip, in particular, is perhaps the purest stretch of visual seduction in Gray’s filmography, beginning with the train taking father and son to the edge of wilderness, intercut with brief views of the homefront à la the conclusion of Fellini’s I vitelloni (1953), and moving to the weird ravishment of the torchlit ceremony that precedes our protagonist’s final disappearance.
This could just be my film-addled brain doing the talking, but I nevertheless suspect he finds deep meaning in these branches, perhaps evidenced best by a reference to Fellini’s I Vitelloni so specific as to jolt me out of my seat a bit.
And the director’s filmic references — whether it’s The Leopard, The Four Feathers, The Charge of the Light Brigade, or Barry Lyndon — are all to movies about hierarchies and the ways an established social order preserves and propagates itself.