Land of the Lost (2009)

Another modern-day film adaptation of a television series that failed to make the grade…

Directed by: Brad Silberling Starring: Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, Danny McBride, Jorma Taccone, Leonard Nimoy

The year is 2009. Will Ferrell is one of the most prominent comedy actors in Hollywood. After making his name as part of a (now) legendary cast of Saturday Night Live, as well as making notable supporting appearances in the first two Austin Powers films and 2001 cult comedy hit Zoolander, Will Ferrell would successfully manage to transfer his small-screen success into commercial, and critical success on the big screen in 2003. After sharing the lead role with Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson, in fraternity comedy Old School, the release of Elf later that year would see Ferrell’s breakthrough as a leading comedy star. The film about an oversized elf who travels to New York City to find his human father would gross $222 million worldwide, finishing as the 20th highest-grossing film of 2003. After closing out 2003 in style, the following year would see Ferrell portray his most iconic character, 1970s news anchor Ron Burgundy, for the first time. Despite not being an overwhelming box office success, grossing $90 million against a $26 million budget, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy would find an audience, eventually producing a sequel in 2013. Now on a roll, the next five years following Anchorman would produce further hits for Will Ferrell, including Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), Blades of Glory (2007) and Step Brothers (2008). During this time, Ferrell would earn Golden Globe nominations for his performances in The Producers (2005) and Stanger Than Fiction (2006). In 2009, now top of the comedy world, Ferrell would star in his most expensive comedy to date, an $100 million effects-heavy adventure comedy based on a popular 1970s TV series. The title of the movie and the TV series was Land of the Lost.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Land of the Lost was a children’s TV series that ran on NBC between 1974 and 1976. The series focused on the Marshalls, a family that had travelled through a time warp into a world inhabited by dinosaurs and humanoid creatures. Each week would see father Rick, daughter Holly and son Will encountering the inhabitants of this alternate world. These creatures may help or harm the Marshalls, depending on the episode’s plot. Land of the Lost was created by David Gerrold and produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, who had also worked on the series H.R. Pufnstuf.  Many of the creatures on Land of the Lost utilised stop-motion animation or puppetry. Land of the Lost turn out a success, lasting three seasons and 43 episodes.

In 1991, Sid and Marty Krofft would remake Land of the Lost, with this new show airing Saturday mornings on ABC. This show would feature an expanded special effects budget compared to its predecessor, using more computer animation than the original series. This revived Land of the Lost series would last for two seasons and 26 episodes between September 1991 and December 1992. Today, this second TV series is not as fondly remembered as the 1970s original and is yet to see the light of day on DVD or Blu-Ray. Come 2009, it would be Will Ferrell’s turn to bring a new audience to the Land of the Lost story.

Brad Silberling, the man behind Casper (1995) and A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), would direct the film version of Land of the Lost. Original show creators Sid and Marty Krofft would act as producers on this film with Silberling, frequent Will Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), and Daniel Lupi (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) serving as executive producers. Chris Henchy, a co-creator of the website ‘Funny or Die’ with Will Ferrell, and Dennis McNicholas, a former head writer of Saturday Night Live during Ferrell’s tenure on the show, would write the screenplay. The film would even hire Dion Beebe, the Oscar-winner behind Memoirs of a Geisha, Collateral and Chicago as its cinematographer, and Michael Giacchino would even provide an original score. With all these notable people involved, how would the movie turn out?

The plot of this loose film adaptation concerns Rick Marshall (played by Will Ferrell). Rick is a disgraced palaeontologist whose career was ruined after a disastrous TV interview went viral. Now down on his luck and working at the La Brea Tar Pits, a PhD student named Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel, Pushing Daisies) convinces Rick to return to and complete his research into time warps and alternate dimensions. Using his ‘tachyon amplifier’, the two track a signal to a rundown cave and tourist attraction managed by Will Stanton (Danny McBride). During a trip through the cave, Marshall’s amplifier opens a hole into an alternate dimension, sending the trio into a world featuring dinosaurs, lizardmen known as ‘Sleestak’ and humanoid primates known as ‘Pakuni’. Now, Rick, Will and Holly must recover the ‘tachyon amplifier’ and return home, all while managing to survive in this alien dimension.

Land of the Lost is unremarkably bland. It joins a list of ’60s and ’70s TV shows that Hollywood tried to turn into movies in the 1990s and 2000s. However, instead of becoming a success like 1994’s Maverick or 2008’s Get Smart, it would go the same way as 1999’s Wild Wild West and 2002’s I Spy. Despite the comedic talents of Will Ferrell and Danny McBride, they cannot mine much more than a few begrudging smiles out of the script of this woefully unfunny romp. Seriously, the funniest line in this 101-minute £100m comedy comes from Danny McBride’s character explaining that he does not trust anyone who wears a tunic. Like 2007’s Evan Almighty, another comedy known for its sizeable budget, money does not equal funny in Land of the Lost. Much of the humour comes from turning the premise of a Saturday morning children’s TV series into a more adult movie. Along with turning the characters of Will and Holly from being Rick Marshall’s children into his adult companions, the film also includes strong language, a sequence of Rick, Will and their ‘pakuni’ friend Cha-Ka high on some local drug (soundtracked by Jimi Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower) and a long shot of Rick relaxing with his hand down his underpants. The filmmakers also treat the audience to another scene of Marshall trying to improvise a song on a banjo while a CGI bug sucks out more and more of his blood until he begins to turn grey.

On the subject of CGI, it is clear that everything that takes place in the alternate dimension was shot on a soundstage against a green screen. According to the film’s production notes, parts of Land of the Lost were shot in the Mojave Desert. However, aside from the scenes before the main character’s journey into the other world, every background in the film, including scenes set in deserts and inside caves, looks fake. Most of the creatures featured in Land of the Lost are CGI. While these creations may have looked good in 2009, the same cannot be said today. Any suspension of disbelief is immediately lost whenever a computer-generated character comes close to the camera or interacts with the leading characters in this movie. In addition, the makers of Land of the Lost cannot make up their minds how far they want to go when using CGI. While all the dinosaurs and bugs are fully computer-generated, the ‘Sleestak’ are people wearing costumes. This move can create a jarring effect, especially when moving from modern CGI techniques to effects as bad as the Gorn from Star Trek: The Original Series. This jarring effect worsens when these costumes are later fitted with CGI teeth in post-production to make the ‘Sleestak’ look menacing.

In Land of the Lost, the characters you are about to spend 1 hour and 41 minutes with are nothing to write home about. Due to this, the performances in the film are nothing to write home about either. Land of the Lost is a clear example that Will Ferrell cannot be funny in a motion picture if not given the right material. Ferrell feels like he is phoning in his role in this $100m special-effects comedy. Even though the film’s writers are close friends with Ferrell, it is clear that these sketch writers were not the right people to compose a screenplay that can keep the audience laughing for 101 minutes. Anna Friel gives the best performance of the three lead characters. Acting as a solid ‘straight woman’, Friel imbues the character of Holly with competence and intelligence, both of the analytical and emotional kinds. It is, therefore, a shame that the writing forces her into the role of Will Ferrell’s love interest as part of a forced romantic subplot, an inclusion that never feels genuine. As the film’s ‘straight character’, Friel is the one for whom all of the unfunny jokes bounce off. Due to Cha-Ka’s lack of understanding of the English language, Holly has to act as the translator for many of the risqué lines delivered by the primate. Holly also has to put up with the unfunny long-running joke of the pakuni’s obsession with her breasts, one that feels tired even by 2009’s standards. Finally, in Land of the Lost, Danny McBride plays a character he has previously portrayed in films like Tropic Thunder or 30 Minutes Or Less. In this movie, Will is a survivalist who runs a gift shop, utilises martial arts in combat situations, gets high and carries fireworks around in his bag. Aside from the central roles, all the other characters in the film are not worth mentioning (including the film’s villain and a ‘Sleestak’ voiced by Leonard Nimoy) because these characters have minimal bearing on your overall enjoyment of Land of the Lost.

Universal Pictures would release Land of the Lost in North America on 5th June 2009, beginning a summer schedule that would include Bruno, Funny People and Inglourious Basterds. The UK would later release the film on 31st July 2009. Domestically, the film would open with an $18.8 million gross to finish 3rd in its opening weekend behind The Hangover ($44.9m) and Up ($44.1m). Land of the Lost would spend two further weeks in the US box office top 10 (5th, 8th) before eventually finishing with a $49.4 million domestic gross. However, the film’s reach would not spread to other countries, managing to gross just $19.3 million internationally. The most significant numbers outside of North America would come from Russia ($3.2m), Australia ($3.1m) and Mexico ($2.9m), respectively. In the United Kingdom, Land of the Lost would open 6th at the box office, grossing $1.07 million to finish behind fellow new releases G-Force ($4.1m) and The Taking of Pelham 123 ($2.9m). The film would spend just one week in the UK top ten, eventually grossing a total of $2.8 million (£4.5 million).

Despite a $100 million production budget and Will Ferrell’s star power at the time, Land of the Lost would become the most notable box office bomb of 2009, grossing $68.7 million worldwide. Considering the combined production and marketing budgets ($26m), TheNumbers.com would report that the failure of Land of the Lost had lost Universal Pictures $64.4 million. This amount would only be bettered by the $100 million lost by Robert Zemeckis’s animated motion-capture version of A Christmas Carol released in November 2009.

In addition to poor box office reception, Sid and Marty Krofft, the creators of the original 1974 television series, would disown Land of the Lost, proclaiming it ‘one of the worst films ever made’ at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con. In a 2011 interview, Universal Pictures studio head Ron Meyer would call the film ‘crap’.

Following the Land Of The Lost‘s failure, Will Ferrell’s name would rarely appear solely above a film title again. Land of the Lost would serve as his only cinematic release in 2009. However, 2010 would see Will Ferrell return to top form. He would co-star with Mark Wahlberg in buddy cop comedy The Other Guys, voice a supervillain-gone-good in the DreamWorks animation Megamind and live on his front lawn in the independent comedy-drama Everything Must Go. Having been burned by Land of the Lost‘s failure, Will Ferrell now thinks twice before starring in a big-budget film based on a television series.

Featuring terrible CGI, predictable plotting and painfully unfunny humour across the board, it would serve you well to avoid Land of the Lost, a rightfully forgotten movie.