Tropic Sprockets / The Lost City of Z

By Ian Brockway

James Gray (The Immigrant ) tells the compelling story of the explorer Percy Fawcett (who, some have said, served as a model for Indiana Jones). In the early 1900s, Fawcett journeyed to South America , obsessed with the idea of a “lost” but intelligent society that was apart from Western culture but surprisingly self-sufficient.

The film is striking and vivid having a literary power akin to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The jungle seethes with bright phosphorescent color almost to the point of psychedelia. At times, it is hard to tell whether the florid yet strangely gothic and forbidding environment is objectively real or a symptom of an adventurer’s fever dream.

Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is confined by sedate British life and yearns for the unexplored. The Royal Geographical Society invites him to explore Bolivia for a survey expedition. Fawcett agrees. He takes along an aide Colonel Costin (Robert Pattinson) and an added sidekick.

Things slowly develop into an otherworldly mood as the three are left to fend for themselves amidst a thirsty “green desert.” The men try to avoid snakes and the indigenous people who stare at the explorers as if they are weird albino creatures from an unknown land, and they are. Fawcett is ridiculed for trying to communicate with the inhabitants and espousing their intelligence. The British want them submissive, conquered and killed.

This film is at its best when it slides in and out of the hallucinatory as in the epics of Francis Ford Coppola or Kubrick. Indeed, echoes of “Apocalypse Now” and the life size pageantry of “Barry Lyndon” are close at hand.

What really happened to Fawcett and his son Jack (Tom Holland) ? All is speculation.

One of the last scenes showing our intrepid adventurer and his son drugged and carried away is both terrifying and as fanciful as anything you are likely to see on film this year. And the mournful moments of Mrs. Fawcett (Sienna Miller) would make fashion designer Alexander McQueen blush in sable.

“The Lost City of Z” is a real life Gothic adventure tale that makes a colorful cinematic cousin to last year’s “Embrace of the Serpent” by Ciro Guerra.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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