It is while dodging snakes, starvation and jaguars that Fawcett sees signs of pottery that suggest to him “cities,” walls of skulls and carvings that might be hallucinations, or might be proof of what he comes to call “The Lost City of Zed.” He is English, after all. Treacherous rubber barons, a mission that the government has second thoughts about, suspicious natives, “primitive” tribal ambushes, an unyielding river and unrelenting rain play into it all.
#Lost city of zed movie#
They inelegantly meet, which infuriates Fawcett, who has staked his “reputation as a man” on this quest.īut once in the jungle, the two come to rely on one another as they pass each square of the Jungle Movie Jeopardy board game. Joining him is a dissolute aide de camp, Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson). He is to map the rubber-plantation destined border between Bolivia and Brazil as an objective third party, saving South America from another brushfire war between neighbors. And when the Army drops a dangerous job on his lap, the Royal Geographical Society swells aren’t shy about dangling “save your family name” in front of him.
He’d like his regal wife (Sienna Miller) and their growing brood of children to grow up without that cloud (his father’s ill-repute) hanging over them. His competitiveness gains notice among all the right people.īut “He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors,” one of the most withering self-admissions ever to come out of the “Downton Abbey” generation.įawcett is keenly aware of this fact himself, even if he isn’t as touchy about his sissy first name. A throwback figure like Fawcett was a Victorian in an Edwardian age, a man with a stain on his family’s honor who sought, by a years-long pursuit involving bravery, suffering and audacity, to reclaim for his descendants their place in Britain’s rigid hierarchy.Ĭharlie Hunnam (“Crimson Peak,” “Pacific Rim”) is Fawcett, an Army officer we meet on a stag hunt in 1903. He disappeared making one last trek into the jungle to find proof of a forgotten civilization in a place the old men of the Royal Geographic Society had permanently labeled “a green desert.”īut one of the truths to emerge from “The Lost City of Z,” David Grann’s book about Fawcett’s search, is that this hunt wasn’t about discovery as much as it was about proving one’s self worth. Major Percy Fawcett was a peripheral figure among that last gasp of stiff-upper-lip British explorers, a tragic figure who set out to find something exciting in one of the last great blank spots on the map - Amazonia.
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