In the Lost Lands is a 2025 dark fantasy action film directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, written by Constantin Werner from a story by Werner and Anderson, and loosely adapted from George R.R. Martin's 1982 short story of the same name. It runs 101 minutes and stars Milla Jovovich as the witch Gray Alys and Dave Bautista as the hunter Boyce, who travel together across a post-apocalyptic wasteland so that she can obtain the power of a werewolf. It was made for fifty-five million dollars and grossed six and a half million worldwide. I want to state for the record that this is the only occasion on which I will acknowledge having seen it.

Let me begin where the film begins, which is the visual effects. I have genuinely sat here attempting to recall a film with worse wall-to-wall green screen work, and I cannot produce one. It is relentless. Every environment, every backdrop, every vista, and a great deal of what is standing in front of them. Critics at the time reached for phrases like green screen overkill and z-grade compositing, and one review put it more precisely than I could manage, noting that the strangest thing about the experience is that it never feels like a film even while it is being projected in front of you. That is exactly right. It has the texture of a cut scene you are not permitted to skip.

There is a technical explanation, and it is almost sympathetic. This production was an experiment in creating blockbuster-scale digital environments on a fraction of a blockbuster budget, leaning heavily on virtual production. The ambition is not nothing. The result is that essentially nothing on screen is real, for a hundred and one consecutive minutes, and the human eye notices.

For anybody following along with this channel, this is my third encounter with Paul W.S. Anderson. I covered Event Horizon, which I genuinely enjoyed and rated reasonably well, and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, which received a 2 and which critics broadly regard as the weakest entry in that series. Between the three, I think Anderson and I now have a relationship, and I am not certain it is a healthy one.

The question I could not shake while watching, however, was a simple one. How did nobody involved in this have anything better to do? Were there genuinely no other offers on the table? Surely, for several of these people, taking no work at all would have been the stronger career move.

The answer turns out to be considerably worse than I anticipated, because nobody here was trapped. Milla Jovovich has been married to Anderson for well over a decade and has been his creative collaborator for far longer. And both Jovovich and Bautista are credited as producers on the film. They did not merely accept the roles. They helped bring the project into existence. Nobody was coerced. They saw this coming and walked towards it.