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Topic: Lost City of Z (Read 1840 times)
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15157
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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.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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This cast makes the movie seem unwatchable and I know NOTHING about it.
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Johny Cee
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3454
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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.
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15157
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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.
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Johny Cee
Terracotta Army
Posts: 3454
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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.
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15157
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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.
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Samwise
Moderator
Posts: 19212
sentient yeast infection
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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).
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"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
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Khaldun
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15157
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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".
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