Back in 2016 when it was being screened at my local cinema and elsewhere, I had planned to see The Lost City of Z. A then newly-released movie directed by James Gray (who also co-produced it and wrote its screenplay), it chronicled the life and pioneering South American expeditions of the famous English explorer Lieut.-Col. Percy Fawcett during the first quarter of the 20th Century. Tragically, however, these explorations culminated in the still-unexplained disappearance of both Fawcett and his son Jack in 1925 while seeking the fabled ancient city of this notable film biopic's title that was claimed by native tribes to exist deep within uncharted Amazonia, Brazil.
Unfortunately, I never did manage to catch it on the big screen, but on 10 March 2019, after discovering that this movie was being shown on the UK television channel BBC2, I decided to make up for lost time and put everything aside to watch it.
Strictly from a cryptozoological perspective, The Lost City of Z is a disappointment to me, inasmuch as it does not include any mention whatsoever of Fawcett's famed encounter with a supposedly gigantic anaconda (click here to read my ShukerNature blog account of it), or of any of the other cryptids referred to by him in his writings. These latter include the Bolivian mitla (click here to read about this elusive, still-unidentified dog-like cat, or cat-like dog?), long-necked sauropod dinosaur lookalikes, and a huge toothless freshwater shark or shark-reminiscent fish (which may be a giant catfish, as I discuss here).
However, what this movie does include, and portray very graphically, is the extremely hostile nature of the terrain that Fawcett and his fellow expedition members habitually faced, especially back in that long-gone age when sophisticated, rapidly-effective medicines, satellite navigation, and internet/mobile communication were not even imagined, let alone available. Dangerous wildlife, even more dangerous native tribes, merciless extreme weather conditions, and all manner of foul diseases beset the explorers at every turn, making it little short of miraculous that any of them ever returned home to tell the tale of their daring exploits. Sadly, as noted earlier, Fawcett and his son did not return from their final quest, and although there have been claimed sightings of them living with a tribe deep within the Amazon jungle, no conclusive evidence for this has ever been obtained.
The three principal roles in this movie are all played superbly - Fawcett himself by Charlie Hunnam (already very familiar to me from the outlaw biker TV series Sons of Anarchy), his loyal expedition companion Corporal Henry Costin by Robert Pattinson (from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and also, shudder, Twilight), and Fawcett's wife Nina by Sienna Miller (this is the first of her films that I have seen). As Fawcett was lost, his fate unknown, the movie's ending is inevitably speculative, although the main storyline of the movie follows the content of David Grann's 2009 non-fiction book of the same name, recounting Fawcett's history and his obsession with discovering Z.
Ironically, after Fawcett's claims that such a city existed were discounted by many mainstream archaeologists for decades, in recent years anthropologist Michael Heckenberger has uncovered ruins, moats, plus evidence of wooden structures and roads cutting through the jungle at a site in the Amazon Xingu region that may actually be the lost city of Z. Archaeological work here is ongoing, so although we may never know what happened to Fawcett and his son, his belief in Z may ultimately be validated. He would, undoubtedly, have approved.
I greatly enjoyed The Lost City of Z, so if you'd like a glimpse of this thought-provoking movie and the daunting rigours faced and endured by Fawcett and his fellow explorers within what has been graphically dubbed the Green Hell of South America's densest and most dangerous expanses of tropical rainforest, click here to view a very telling trailer, revealing a man driven by a dream of discovery but which ultimately transformed into a nightmare with no ending.
And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
I first heard of Percy Fawcett in the context of cryptozoology, which probably says a lot about me.
ReplyDeleteSame with me. I first heard about him in cryptozoologist Dr Bernard Heuvelmans's book On the Track of Unknown Animals, in which he documented and discussed Fawcett's claim about having encountered and shot a giant anaconda far bigger than any specimen confirmed by science.
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