Movie Review: 'The Lost City of Z' is old-style explorer epic

In recent years, director James Gray has expanded his canvas beyond the world of Russian immigrants in New York he explored in films like Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night towards the historical, beginning with The Immigrant and now in The Lost City of Z.

Gray here moves away from the US to tell the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett - whose story remains an unexplained mystery of exploration.

It's no spoiler to reveal that Fawcett is most remembered for his obsession with finding a mythical city in the Amazon, which he called Z and believed could possibly be the legendary El Dorado.

His obsession ultimately led him to embark on a final journey to South America with his son from which the two never returned, their fate a mystery.

Gray opts for an epic in the vein of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia with a single-minded character at its heart, reminiscent of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

Fawcett as played by Charlie Hunnam is a complicated man, a soldier stuck without much hope of advancement whose wanderlust leads him to travel to South America on a mapping mission for the Royal Society.

While Fawcett is devoted to his wife (Sienna Miller) and son (Tom Holland), his determination to stamp his name on the world exceeds his desire to settle down.

In the Amazon, accompanied by a drunken surveyor (Robert Pattinson), Fawcett gets more adventure than he planned - cannibal tribesmen with poisoned arrows, piranhas, torrential rain and tropical diseases.

During the expedition he comes across some shards of pottery which convince him of the existence of the city of Z and spur on successive trips and defenses of his conviction to Royal Society members back home.

Watch the trailer of The Lost City of Z

Exquisitely photographed by Darius Khondji and displaying carefully reserved direction from Gray, the result, while decidedly more classic than contemporary in its approach, mostly succeeds in providing a compelling portrait of one man's perhaps mistakenly dogged pursuit of his ambition at all costs.

Anchored by a strong performance from Hunnam, it's ultimately a study of the mindset of a man of adventure rather than a mythologising of him through a breathless recounting of his actions.

We may never know exactly what became of Fawcett and his son, but thanks to this film we now have a better idea of what they were thinking when they disappeared into the jungle for one last attempt at immortality.

WHAT OTHERS SAY

• Eschews multiplex formulae in favour of the jungle of the mind, a much more fertile place to explore. - Peter Howell, Toronto Star

• The never-ending jungle proves perfectly suited to the filmmaker's lush, operatic aesthetic. - Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

• One of the most beautiful and mysterious of all existentialist adventure films receives a deservedly lush and subtle transfer. - Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine

• This article was originally published in The Times.