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f13.net General Forums => Movies => Topic started by: Khaldun on May 18, 2017, 05:25:51 PM



Title: Lost City of Z
Post by: Khaldun on May 18, 2017, 05:25:51 PM
Ordinarily I wouldn't start a topic for a film I didn't love, but I think people hereabouts might be tempted to see it. You might all like it: I thought it was a decent film but a story that's been told a zillion times in a very similar way. Ultimately a disappointment.


Title: Re: Lost City of Z
Post by: schild on May 18, 2017, 05:41:59 PM
This cast makes the movie seem unwatchable and I know NOTHING about it.


Title: Re: Lost City of Z
Post by: Johny Cee on May 18, 2017, 05:45:38 PM
I have no idea about the film, but the book is pretty great...  it was all over NPR like six months ago.

Goes into the craziness involved in that old timey exploration, even if it was the end of that period with planes/etc catching up.  The basic idea that was being investigated was that there were large thriving civilizations in the Amazon pre-Discovery....  that had basically collapsed and than been eaten by the jungle probably due to disease.


Title: Re: Lost City of Z
Post by: Khaldun on May 18, 2017, 06:58:37 PM
Many of the interesting things in the book--including the open question of whether Percy Fawcett was just nuts in certain ways--are not explored well in the film.


Title: Re: Lost City of Z
Post by: Johny Cee on May 19, 2017, 07:28:09 AM
Many of the interesting things in the book--including the open question of whether Percy Fawcett was just nuts in certain ways--are not explored well in the film.


Dude was nuts.  He kept doing something that had like an 80% mortality rate, and then was excited to bring his son with him?  The 19th C./early 20th C. explorers make very interesting reading.  Hearts of Darkness (non-fiction book on the exploration of Africa... guys like Burton and Speke,  not Heart of Darkness the book by Conrad) is a great read.  The Burton/Speke story was turned into an interesting film called Mountains of the Moon.


Title: Re: Lost City of Z
Post by: Khaldun on May 19, 2017, 09:50:48 AM
Film insists on dispelling the ambiguity around Fawcett's obsession with Z, too--it has him stumble over pottery and artifacts in the rainforest. In the book, his theory about Z is the result of research and a few conversations with Native Americans, it's not because he sees some real artifacts or material signs. Even today the recent evidence for a real "Z" is still being debated and disputed to some extent, and it's *still* very hard to fully explore the area and do solid archaeological work.


Title: Re: Lost City of Z
Post by: Samwise on May 19, 2017, 10:31:11 AM
Film insists on dispelling the ambiguity around Fawcett's obsession with Z, too--it has him stumble over pottery and artifacts in the rainforest. In the book, his theory about Z is the result of research and a few conversations with Native Americans, it's not because he sees some real artifacts or material signs.

Oh good, because that part of the movie made no sense to me, in terms of why nobody but him ever saw these stone faces because they always had to turn back around RIGHT THEN, or why his peers were pooh-poohing him immediately after he brought back artifacts to show them (but then inexplicably turned around years later to finance his last expedition).


Title: Re: Lost City of Z
Post by: Khaldun on May 20, 2017, 08:05:12 PM
Yeah, it's clumsy as fuck in the movie because the director can't make up his mind if he really wants it to be ambiguous or not. So he shoots it like Scooby-Doo or like Big Bird seeing Snufalapagus for years, etc.  In real life, Fawcett just became convinced that there was a hidden city in the jungle--and became more convinced after Macchu Picchu was found. He turns out to have been sorta kinda right, though less than the movie (and book) want, because the findings are still being debated/analyzed. But in his time, it was almost entirely because he read some old documents and decided that El Dorado was based on something real, and because he saw that various Amazonian Native Americans had sophisticated agriculture, etc., and weren't just ekeing out marginal existences in the "green desert".