This is just me but when I found out there was

1) a new Milla Jovovich picture directed by her partner in life and filmmaking Paul Warm Sweater Anderson that

2) co-stars Dave Bautista and

(bonus points) is a post-apocalyptic western fantasy, I transported myself to the next matinee. It’s called IN THE LOST LANDS and the advertising hook (to the extent that they’re advertising it) is that it’s based on a short story by Game of Thrones creator George Ruff Ryders Martin. So it’s worth watching for the middle initials alone.

It takes place in the far future, after a nuclear war. Much of the earth is now “The Lost Lands,” where people don’t generally go on account of monsters ’n shit. Most humans live in one tall but small city built around a cool skull face, sometimes but not always speaking in florid language. It’s a monarchy ruled by a Queen (Amara Okereke) and I guess her husband the Overlord (Jacek Dzisewicz), but he’s bedridden, and anyway the real power seems to be a Christian order who make giant crosses out of machinery and spread the word of Jesus by terrorizing and behaving in ways that could not possibly be further from anything that dude ever represented. So, pretty similar to what we’re dealing with now.

It starts off narrated by a guy named Boyce (Bautista, MASTER Z: THE IP MAN LEGACY), and it’s almost like he’s hosting the movie – he looks right into the camera and promises to tell us the story of how he met a witch named Gray Alys (Jovovich, HE GOT GAME) and how she saved his life. Both of them have face tattoos that resemble the outline of goggles. I don’t remember them actually wearing goggles but I hope if they did they would be just small enough that the ink is still visible.

Gray Alys is introduced as a closeup of one light blue eye, and you already know it’s Milla. She’s about to be publicly hung on orders of The Enforcer (Arly Jover, Mercury from BLADE), but she uses her witchly mind powers to confuse her executioners and escape, which makes her a folk hero across the city, “The Witch They Couldn’t Hang.” The other thing that’s well known about her is that she’s cursed to have to grant everyone their desires, so you can come to her with your requests, like when the Queen asks to become a shapeshifter. Gray Alys says she’ll need until the full moon because to steal a shapeshifter’s power she has to kill him in his lair while he’s transformed. That sounds dangerous, and there’s another hiccup: the Queen’s handler or whatever, Jerais (Simon Lööf), comes to Gray Alys and wishes for her to fail the Queen’s request. So somehow she has to do both.

Boyce is the Han Solo type, the “hunter” she finds in a tavern, who has experience in the Lost Lands and knows a place called Skull River where a shapeshifter lives. He wears a cowboy hat and duster in tribute to westerns and carries a deadly two-headed snake in tribute to Martin Kove in STEELE JUSTICE.

With MORTAL KOMBAT in 1995, Paul World Star Anderson introduced me to the idea that digital characters could look like shit. (I’m still a fan.) Now I trust him to make cool looking digital critters, like this mob of skeletal zombie attackers and a particularly over-the-top werewolf transformation. There’s an aughts excessiveness to the way he throws them at you with impossible camera moves, not even pretending they’re real, but I don’t turn my nose up to that.

CG-phobes might not even get that far because they’ll hate the whole stylized landscape, created as 3D models in pre-production. It’s an aggressively artificial style, often sepia toned, hazy with flares of overexposed white light smeared across the frame. Sometimes I believed they were in a place, other times that blue screen dimension ol’ Sky Captain called “the World of Tomorrow.” It’s more like a painting than reality, but since when has reality been better than a painting? The acrid desaturation reminds me of RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER, thankfully minus the shakiness. There’s some similarity to Zack Snyder (including speed-ramping) but the director it kept reminding me of was Albert Pyun – cool actors dressed up in a mix of modern and feudal costuming, kicking ass and speaking very earnestly about absurd shit, with kind of a strange pace and dreamy lighting.

It’s not as much of a full-on action movie as the RESIDENT EVILs, more in the western tradition, but Milla does get to fight, and there’s some absurd vehicle-based action. Fight choreographer/coordinator Sébastien Peres was on the fight team for JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4 and was stunt choreographer for DISTRICT B13.

Boyce is a pretty fun character. There’s a twist on the self-surgery trope – he pours booze on the wound and bites into a stick like anybody, but he digs the bullet out with his bare fingers. Also this guy gets around. At the beginning we see that he’s fucking the Queen (!), and when he and Gray Alys spend a night with his old friends, Mara (Deirdre Mullins, MANDRAKE) is super excited to sleep with him, with no objections from Ross (Sebastian Stankiewicz), who might be her husband? Then, of course, an affection builds between Boyce and Gray Alys and it’s indicated that they too knock boots.

That time it’s off screen, and in another scene they almost kiss but we don’t see that either. I’m sure it would’ve been awkward for all involved if the husband directed the wife being sexy or lovey-dovey with Bautista, I can only speculate what happened there, but it’s conspicuous in its absence.

Speaking of prudes, The Enforcer has a boss called The Patriarch (Fraser James, RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER, TERMINATOR: DARK FATE) who’s excited at the prospect of hanging the Queen for consorting with a witch. Meanwhile, The Enforcer and friends track our heroes, killing anyone who helps them, and catch up using a train covered in spikes like the Bug in THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS.

I know people are calling the writing (by Constantin Werner) bad, and I don’t deny some bits I felt I was laughing at, but also some of the awkwardness is part of a deliberate style that I appreciate. It’s crossing the fantasy, western and Milla Jovovich genres, and it co-stars an ex-wrestler – of course it should be mythic and pulpy and shameless. Whatever the more classy and acceptable version of that is that you’re imagining, I’m sure it’s nice, but this is what I wanted.

I like that Gray Alys and Boyce are heroes in this world but have the vibe of villains, and sometimes you’re not sure which they are. I like that Gray Alys lives up to being the deadly witch that the Christians paint her as, and in the process inspires the oppressed workers to rise up and topple the regime. Like her villain from HELLBOY 2019 as working class hero. Oh shit – this is my WICKED!

I like that it has a surprisingly mean ending (SPOILER) but also panders to me with a little button that makes it a fucked up love story that could’ve led to a bunch of cool sequels if more than me and six other people had paid to see it. (Although didn’t he say at the beginning that it wasn’t a fairy tale and wouldn’t have a happy ending? Is that perjury, your honor?)

I also like that from beginning to end Gray Alys’ lips remain lacquered in a perfect gloss and her hair looks like she just got back from the salon, still smelling of product. She’s magic and deserves to look as nice as she wants to, plus it makes more sense than Boyce having Bautista’s Basquiat and BLADE RUNNER neck tattoos. (I wonder if Boyce knows about SOLDIER and how it takes place in the BLADE RUNNER universe?)

I read that the George Rebel Ridge Martin story is in a standard fantasy setting, not post-apocalyptic, and doesn’t have the Christian crusaders, but it’s the same premise that the Queen hires Gray Alys to give her shapeshifting powers, Boyce leads her to the Lost Lands and the same thing happens when they arrive at their destination. It sounds like the spirit is mostly there, but I’m glad Jovovich’s George Riki Rachtman Martin fandom didn’t stop her husband from getting liberal with the adaptation. He’s best when he riffs.

To me the first chunk of the movie felt a little low energy for Paul Wembley Stadium Anderson, and I started to wonder if it was because up to that point the score by Paul Haslinger (UNDERWORLD, SHOOT ‘EM UP, DEATH RACE) is more electronic ambient sounds than themes. I know not all of his movies are as danceable as MORTAL KOMBAT, but even EVENT HORIZON has “Funky Shit” by The Prodigy on the end credits. So when The Enforcer got on the train and a beat finally started pumping I thought okay, now we’re talking. Later I noticed some classic synth sounds in the mix that made sense when I read up on it and realized that Haslinger was in Tangerine Dream for five years, during which they scored MIRACLE MILE, NEAR DARK and THREE O’CLOCK HIGH. PWSA told R. Emmet Sweeney of Screen Slate:

“Paul ended up contacting Peter Baumann, who was also in Tangerine Dream, and who had kept a lot of these 1980s synthesizers. We used one for some of the tracks on the score. We had a mini Tangerine Dream reunion where Peter came in and played, and we got these unique looping Tangerine Dream synthesizer sounds. They sound like the original ‘80s scores because they were made using that original technology, which I was quite excited about.”

But I don’t think it sounds like a throwback. It’s a modern score with some classic textures. Haslinger is an o.g., not a nostalgist, and I think that’s kind of true of Paul Women in Science Anderson at this point too. For three decades we’ve watched him travel from a cocky young upstart at a time when his love of video games offended the sensibilities of the snobbish, into the world where it was lack of fidelity to said games that was the larger heresy. We’ve seen him continually shift his style and try new ones as technologies changed and as he took influence from others (well, mainly from THE MATRIX. Now a little FURY ROAD).

For his whole career he’s been largely mocked by critics both mainstream (highest score ever on Rotten Tomatoes: 47% for MORTAL KOMBAT) and nerd (Harry Knowles had a straight up vendetta against him), and I confess ALIEN VS. PREDATOR felt like sacrilege to me and turned me against him for a long time. There was that period where a faction of younger writers started worshiping him as a “vulgar auteur,” but these days I only see that mentioned by people making fun of the idea.

Pretension aside, I think those millennials were right. I realized I was a fan when I caught up on the RESIDENT EVIL movies, seeing all his twists and reinventions on the same material, and his subsequent movies (this and MONSTER HUNTER) have cemented it. Like Michael Bay, his persistence over time in pursuing the same obsessions in different ways, his unique skills at executing his idiosyncratic style, and his now-refreshing lack of self consciousness have made him an institution. Overall I like his better than Bay’s because his movies don’t feel macho or hateful toward humanity or (with a couple exceptions) the language of cinema. And most of them star Milla Jovovich.

I’m not saying there’s anything deep about him, because I’m not a ridiculous person who pretends only deep movies have value. He’s a unique voice at creating a certain type of goofy pop entertainment that nobody else can match. IN THE LOST LANDS isn’t his best, and it still warmed my heart (in slow motion with the camera rotating around it).