The Lost Continent

With “Lost Continent”, the seasoned Newfield unsuccessfully tries to rip off the classic “Lost Worlds” genre, but any hope of experiencing a fantastic adventure along the lines of Jules Verne quickly fades. Moreover, the director demonstrates a total inability to develop any sense of adventure, spending nearly an hour on a succession of interminable and repetitive climbing scenes (as if he were making a mountain-climbing instructional video), alternating with slack moments full of wearisome, long-winded chatter.

However, these dialogue scenes actually reveal the film’s true nature as an embarrassing piece of pro-US propaganda celebrating American power (“We always managed to be first in the long race against time, we proved that with the atom bomb“) without even bothering to veil its threats against the Soviet enemy in the name of a self-proclaimed sense of responsibility. (Lines such as: At the end of the day, we Americans will win “even if, heaven forbid, it means pushing buttons and more rockets like the one out there, somewhere“).

In this Cold War context, we’re forced to sit through the boasts of reformed Russian scientist Rostov, who’s repudiated his own origins out of a love of truth and justice, key features of the Western world (“No country can survive when it looses the respect of its own people and the world“). The whole thing is seasoned with spurts of male chauvinism, tiresome, stillborn attempts at humor, and a knuckle-dragging, anti-ecological notion of the environment.

From a technical point of view, the film’s limited budget is more than apparent: the green filter used to represent the world forgotten by time appears ludicrous, and the overall special effects make 1925’s “The Lost World” look good by comparison (as for prehistoric reptiles, very few appear, and the only trace of tyrannosaurs are the ones we see on the movie posters).

The story ends with a gratuitous cataclysm (the total destruction of the dinosaur plateau) and a line meant to shock but which falls flat: “A world coming to an end. Better this way than to have it go on living with us“.

Dreadful.