"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?"

Rating: 8/10 (24 January 2019)

While watching, I had no idea the film was based on a true story. That makes it more interesting in retrospect. Reading some of the trivia notes for the picture here on IMDb, I was intrigued by the fact that the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his Professor Challenger character on that of Percy Fawcett. They in fact were good friends, and Doyle was present at the Royal Geographical Society lecture of February 13th, 1911, the one in which Fawcett described his expedition to Huanchaca Plateau in Bolivia. Fawcett's memoirs, which were posthumously published, spoke of the possibility of "monsters from the dawn of man's existence", an idea taken to heart by Doyle when he came up with his science-fiction novel titled "The Lost World". Quite coincidentally, the silent film version of "The Lost World" was released in 1925, the same year Fawcett went missing with his son in The Amazon.
What fascinates me about Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is that he was determined to return to the Amazon time and again following the first expedition to delineate the border between Bolivia and Brazil. Though that occurred over a span of twenty years, the man never lost his innate desire to find out the truth about a possible 'lost city' that might have existed deep in the jungle, pre-dating the arrival of white men who would doubt the ability of savages to create a civilization. The only disconnect in the story for me was when Fawcett encountered various tribes and attempted the use of Spanish to address the natives as 'amigos'. Barring contact with the outside world, the idea didn't make much sense to me, especially when he would occasionally get a response.
Beautifully filmed, the jungle scenes are breathtaking in scope, and painfully illustrate the types of hardship and discomfort Fawcett's expeditions would have to contend with. Determined to find glory for his home country of England, it was devastating to learn that his final foray into the Amazon was one of no return. The scene in which Fawcett and his son (Tom Holland) were taken captive by a tribe who saved them from an earlier fateful encounter eventually resolves to speculation about how they may have met their deaths. One would also have to speculate as to the veracity of that scene in which Mrs. Fawcett (Sienna Miller) returns the watch presented to her husband by the Royal Geographical Society. Despite the various anomalies, I enjoyed the story and found it a rather thought provoking one, soon to be a century since the tragic disappearance of Percy Fawcett.