In the Lost Lands is a Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-Fi, Action, Fantasy movie from Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil franchise) starring Milla Jovovich (also Resident Evil franchise) and former WWE Superstar Dave Bautista. Jovovich plays “Gray Alys”, a witch tasked with finding and killing a dangerous werewolf in the treacherous “Lost Lands”, while Bautista plays her mysterious hired-gun companion, Boyce. That’s the plot in a nutshell. There’s also a subplot regarding the political battle for a throne, but it’s nothing more than a soap opera side-story, so I won’t waste your time discussing it. Afterall, as anyone who’s ever seen the Resident Evil franchise, Paul W.S. Anderson doesn’t care much about plot. He’s all about style.

Unfortunately, Lost Lands is kinda like sequins – it may be “stylish” but that doesn’t mean it looks good. Visually the movie is a CGI fest. I get the impression the cast were never more than a few feet from a green screen at any point during filming. The scenery is vast, desolate, apocalyptic, and not at all believable. It’s akin to mid 2000’s CGI, where things look passable but never for one single moment look real.

The film’s best visuals are the slow motion action shots. We’re treated to the majestic sight of computerised snakes, pocket watches, and other random HD items flying through the air in super-slow-motion. For what reason, I am unsure. It’s similar to those 3D movies where objects randomly leap at the camera as a gimmick to flaunt 3D technology. Except this movie isn’t 3D, so it’s rather pointless.

A peculiar visual choice is the incessant use of lens flare – the effect you see in modern Star Trek movies where every light source creates an on-screen glare. It makes sense in the futuristic world of Star Trek, with its high-tech gizmos and blinking gadgets, but why anyone would use it in a barren wasteland, where the only light source is the sun and fire, is anyone’s guess. It fits about as well as a distant horizon littered with Christmas lights.

These bizarre decisions make the film look, for lack of a better word, smudgy. I regularly felt the need to wipe my glasses and had to remind myself my glasses were fine, and that the movie itself was smudgy. I presumed the strange visuals were done to resemble a comic book style that Lost Lands was based on, but it isn’t. Amazingly Lost Lands is based on a story by Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin. I can only assume they didn’t ask him to help with writing the screenplay.

The dialogue is woeful, with every line serving no purpose beyond progressing the plot forward. It’s not clever, realistic, entertaining, or even accurate. Ideas are established in one scene, only to be completely contradicted in the next. “That was the last friendly face we’ll see,” says Bautista, right before visiting another friend. “The powers I wield come at a terrible cost” says Jovovich, while suffering no consequences outside of a mild shiver. It seems as though writers copied and pasted common lines for this genre of movie and sprinkled them throughout the script paying no attention to whether they actually fit or made sense.

It’s all very strange to be honest, and not what you’d expect from a movie with such big names attached. In fact, it doesn’t feel like a movie at all. It feels like a video game. There’s a meaningless story to set the context, characters traverse a series of visually distinct “levels”, they easily dispatch cannon fodder as they progress towards a “boss fight”. The “boss” shows up at regular intervals, each time with a slightly bigger gun. It really is eerily similar to a video game. There’s even some “magic horses” who appear when needed, disappear for action scenes, and then magically reappear in a new location right after the boss fight, leaving the viewer to wonder “How the hell did those horses manage to cross that ravine all by themselves?” It’s extraordinarily ironic how after years of being criticised for straying too far from the source material for his Resident Evil movie adaptations, Paul W.S. Anderson has made possibly the most video game accurate movie of all time. And it’s not even based on a video game.

In summary, this movie is genuinely insulting. It’s a shame how far Anderson’s output has fallen. The man has made some decent movies, and even one cult-classic in Event Horizon. But he’s been on a steep decline, and now not only is he scraping the bottom of the barrel, he’s broken through the base and seems to have every intention to keep digging.

In The Lost Lands is the worst movie of the year, and not just so far. I can reasonably assume that nothing worse will come out in 2025.

Score: 1/5

  • Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson
  • Written by: Constantin Werner, Paul W.S. Anderson and George R.R. Martin
  • Starring: Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista
  • Runtime: 1hr 41min
  • Released:  March 7th, 2025 (US) | March 14th, 2025 (UK & IE)

Review by Ross McCarthy, Dublin based screenwriter and stand-up comedian.

In The Lost Lands Trailer