In the Lost Lands (2025)

In the Lost Lands arrives as another post-apocalyptic slog from Paul W. S. Anderson, who has spent the better part of two decades turning his wife into a leather-clad figure of destiny. Milla Jovovich plays Gray Alys, a witch for hire who cannot refuse a request, which is the sort of curse that sounds tragic until you realize it mostly means she keeps accepting errands. Dave Bautista lumbers alongside her as Boyce, a drifter with a secret. George R. R. Martin wrote the source material, and the film strips it of texture, leaving a wasteland of gray rubble and grimacing.

On the matter of cultural messaging, the film is a near-total void. The cast is agreeably mixed, with Black and mixed-race performers in prominent roles, though the script never pauses to congratulate itself for this. A powerful sorceress and a scheming queen anchor the plot, and the women do most of the scheming, but no thesis emerges from it. The ruined Earth is not a climate parable. Nobody rails against a plutocrat. Nobody discusses their relationship to their body, their neurology, or the sins of empire. There is no lecture. The film has no interest in instructing us, which is its single most commendable quality.

It is also, by most accounts, an incomprehensible eyesore, and the box office agrees. Twenty-four percent on Rotten Tomatoes. A reported 55 million dollar budget against 6.5 million in returns. A film can be free of sermonizing and still be a mess, and this one is. We are left with the melancholy task of recording its scores: a modest nod for the ensemble's composition, a faint one for the sorceress, and zeros elsewhere. The wilderness claims another one.