The Lost City of Z

I'm a big fan of James Gray, so I will probably be seeing this one. I wish Benedict could have been in the Lost City of Z, but real life, which is always more important, intervened.

I haven't seen the trailer, but I know what you mean about the story. I've always had misgivings about it. Portraying a European man "exploring" an area that has been populated for centuries by indigenous people seems sounds like the kind of film I thought we had left behind. I hope this is different. I do like James Gray, so I'm going to give it a try.

I always had some misgivings about the film in that I thought it would be ridiculously too expensive relative to a potential audience, but I really don't hold with this super over-sensitivity re the white man "exploring" somewhere where there were indigenous people as if there was something inherently evil with that in principle. Of course there wasn't. According to that too narrow thinking, it would have been inherently evil for anyone of any nationality, ever, to have gone to see what might be in the next village let alone to have made boats to go to see what might be out there in the greater unknown. 

Apart from anything else, Fawcett didn't even actually go to "explore" per se, he was sent there to make maps.

There is an issue re disease and the native people, but that wasn't understood at the time. And the extremity of that damage was done long before through the conquistadors. 

But much as I had reservations about the financial feasibility of it, I was always quite interested in the film. I thought there was a chance it might be James Gray's breakthrough to a deserved greater recognition. And so it might have been with BC, but I think it's far less likely with Charlie Hunnam, even though the reception so far seems to have been good. I've watched the trailers, and visually it looks very interesting, but I've been very put off by Charlie Hunnam's speaking voice in it. The accent and way of speaking is so forced and fake, it's just terrible. It had me cringing, it was so bad, and that doesn't make for a good viewing experience. I don't suppose that will matter to the American audience, or to the French (the French like James Gray), but it's put me off really quite badly. 

I agreed with dreamsincolour about the "exploring" thing. The story is real and we should never ignore things that really happened. Of course, we should expect the story to be tell in a mature non-simplistic way.

The book and the New Yorker article are fantastic and one thing that I really loved about them is how they present the clash between old ideals vs. new ones. Fawcett was the last explorer from a romantic era who actually did important discoverings (for the Western world, at least) and was a decent guy but he was also a joke to his more scientific oriented peers. Then there is a part in which the book describes how easily some charlatans sold the idea that spiritism was something scientific with men who see themselves as very rational men like Conan Doyle actually believing in extremely silly things like fairies! It was science and the future and not legends about fantastic creatures in the Amazon by crazy explorers!

About the indigenous people, there is this part, in the article, in which the writer talks with an old native woman who met Fawcett which is really interesting. When she was a kid she lived in horrible conditions thanks to the (very scientific) project of Brazilian government to "civilize" and "educate" indigenous people. Apparently Fawcett with his considered at the time old views of the world was shocked by the conditions and he hardly criticize them. Ironically, the writer describes how the modern government is now trying to fix the old errors with programs designed to force the same people to keep ancient traditions that they actually never knew!

So even when the book is about the fascination with old time adventurers exploring exotic places it's also IMO very thoughtful about it and the world in which he lived and we live nowadays.