Of all the standard genre-movie trailer openings—the BWAAAH, the ping!, the backstory, etc.—one of my favorites is the challenge. “If you’ve got the time and the stomach for it,” Dave Bautista intones at the start of the In the Lost Lands trailer, “I’ve got a story for you.”
Do you, Dave? Really? Because this looks somewhat less like a story than a string of cliches, from the Snyderesque slow-motion to the desaturated colors to the search for “immense power” to the vaguest of worldbuilding: world you know is gone, great war, don’t go outside the city, you know the drill. It’s a post-apocalyptic western, full of lone cowboys and still-working guns. Of course, there is a train.
To be fair, In the Lost Lands is based on several George R.R. Martin stories; the title comes from a 1982 work, so some of these things were not so well-worn at the original time of writing. But that doesn’t excuse making such a bland-looking film—one that even the always-fun-to-watch Milla Jovovich seems unlikely to save. The director is Paul W.S. Anderson, whose most recent offerings have included Monster Hunter and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. He co-wrote the screenplay with Constantin Werner (The Pagan Queen).
The synopsis is brief:
A Queen sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where the sorceress and her guide, the drifter Boyce, must outwit and outfight man and demon.
“Outside these walls, the laws of nature—they don’t apply,” Bautista’s Boyce says, midway through the trailer, but given that he’s already thrown a two-headed snake at an enemy, the laws of nature seem absent from the get-go. It is somewhat hard to tell, here, who is on which side; who are the people the sorceress is trying to free, and who are the ones saying she needs to die? What do the dudes with crosses on their outfits have to do with it? What’s with the sort of Dark City looking bit?
You, too, may find yourself with a lot of questions after watching the trailer. You may or may not choose to have them answered when the film arrives on March 7th.
