The Odyssey's Tom Holland And Robert Pattinson Co-Starred In An Adventure Flop That Needs More Love

Characters in James Gray's films are typically looking for something. In "The Immigrant," Marion Cotillard and Angela Sarafyan play sisters who leave post-WWI Poland in search of a better life in the U.S. In "Ad Astra," Brad Pitt portrays an astronaut who traverses our solar system to track down his long-missing father. Of course, what they're really trying to find, on a spiritual level, is more slippery and harder to pin down.

Enter Charlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett, the real-life British cartographer and surveyor at the heart of Gray's movie "The Lost City of Z." Adapted from the non-fiction book by David Grann (the "Killers of the Flower Moon" author whose writing has become catnip for Hollywood), the film picks up with Fawcett in the early 1900s. At the time, he's eager to restore his family's social standing after his father drove their name into the mud. So, when he's tasked with mapping part of the Bolivia-Brazil border to settle a disagreement between the countries, he happily accepts what promises to be a pretty dangerous job tromping through acres of stifling, dense jungle. But what begins as a way for Fawcett to do some social climbing (a dubious prospect by itself) becomes something else entirely when he grows obsessed with locating what's said to be a long-lost city in the region. 

"The Lost City of Z" is a steadily paced yet mesmerizing adventure film that paints its lead in rich shades of grey, so much so that the movie's version of Fawcett is probably a lot more complicated and palatable than the actual guy. It also, sadly, flopped at the box office in 2017, which is why most folks have no idea this movie brought Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson together roughly a decade before Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" did.

The thing about most of the films Tom Holland acted in before being cast as Spider-Man is that they tend not to feature him in any major capacity. Naturally, there are exceptions like his and Jon Bernthal's medieval action/drama "Pilgrimage," but "The Lost City of Z" is not one of them. It's also not much of a vehicle for Robert Pattinson, though you can see now how the movie hinted at both his and Holland's greater acting abilities.

For starters, "The Lost City of Z" helped to establish Pattinson's knack for playing weirdos. He co-stars as Henry Costin, a British explorer who accompanies Fawcett on his mission to South America, yet there's just something ... off about the guy, in case his untamed beard didn't clue you in. (Then again, you'd have to be a little eccentric to follow someone like Fawcett on his hair-brained quest.) Holland, meanwhile, portrays Fawcett's son Jack during the film's second half, and it's very much on the level with his turn as Telemachus in "The Odyssey." In each case, he's playing a character who gets in over his head as he desperately tries to prove just how grown up he is, despite his father being absent for much (if not all) of his childhood. 

It's easy to overlook Holland amidst the lush visuals by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who makes the movie look like an aged, living photograph of a bygone time) and the other performances, but his work warrants attention. Likewise, what better way to celebrate Holland and Pattinson's runaway success with "The Odyssey" than by checking out this often (and unduly) overlooked footnote on their resumes? "The Lost City of Z" is streaming on Prime Video.