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koberulz.bsky.social · @koberulz.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated The Land That Time Forgot 4/10

Jurassic Park this is not. Absent are the interesting characters, the compelling plot, and the convincing visual effects. Absent, too, is the sentimental happy ending, which is the thing I most liked about this film. That it had the guts to go there is certainly its most impressive feat, with its recreation of bygone eras feeling rather lacklustre. The short version of the story: stranded together during the Great War, a group of Germans and a group of Brits must work together to get the one submarine they have between them to safety. They stumble across an undiscovered continent, massacre its indigenous population, and take its oil. It's quite odd to watch as it makes no bones about the way its protagonists are behaving yet also utterly fails to condemn them for their actions. It's left as kind of an open question whether the film feels they're so transparently awful it needn't be commented on, or whether it's so on their side it doesn't realise what's going on. That it ends on such a bleak note, broadly, could suggest the former, but there's a serenity to the fate of its two main characters that carries quite the opposite implication. The big gimmick of the film—the reason to buy a ticket back when this was in theaters—is that the land they come upon has some weird temporal, evolutionary anomaly where all time periods of earth are represented in various locations, moving along in time as they move along a stream whose source is theorised to give birth to life itself. It's a comically inept understanding of evolution and doesn't make much sense even taken on its own terms, but it allows both dinosaurs and prehistoric man to inhabit the space. Both are given roughly the same treatment by the film's protagonists, despite the fact that the men try to be as helpful as they can despite the language barrier while the dinosaurs just attempt to eat everyone. The Germans and the Brits—the latter accompanied by a token American who serves as the main character because of course he does—are obviously ill at ease at the height of the Great War, but are able to band together in the face of a common enemy: brown people. It's less a heartwarming story about humanity overcoming differences and more a cynical story about doing what needs to be done to survive in the moment and then selfishly screwing everyone else over as soon as any other threat has been eliminated.

#movie

Published 2026-06-10 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere