The Dead Lands

Viewed in the context of its intense combat scenes, The Dead Lands is a more-than-serviceable actioner distinguished by its exotic backdrop, gorgeous cinematography and engrossing performances. Add to that the brooding philosophy and ancestral calls to honor, and the film emerges with a heft and humanity rare in the genre.
The Dead Lands has the excitement of a thriller, and a story with the pull of mythic rites of passage. It shows it’s possible to respect and even cheer the skill of the warrior while acknowledging the awful cycles of battle and wounds of pride that precipitate warfare.
The dry-to-lush landscape of New Zealand provides the setting for this tale of warring Maori tribes, in a time before contact with European civilization. When his people are wiped out by bloodthirsty rivals, the lone male survivor—a boy barely 16, named Hongi—commits himself to avenge their deaths. But as much as he has the will, he has neither the battle-tested skill nor the maturity to vanquish those he’s chasing. He’s certainly no match for Wirepa, the cunning rival tribesman who beheaded Hongi’s father, and the prime target of the teen’s revenge. The boy’s quest for retribution will take him through an area called the Dead Lands, so named because a tribe that once made the area home had vanished in an instant.
Throughout the film, Hongi communicates with his deceased grandmother in the afterlife, which looks like bioluminescent organisms moving across a twilight sky. One of those early visions leads him to enlist the help of the Dead Lands’ legendary Warrior, a beast of a man who destroys those who trespass into his domain. This Warrior, who has his own reasons for helping the boy—and a complicated relationship with battle—mentors Hongi as a fighter.
Toa Fraser’s film commits itself and its characters to dealing with the need to honor the dead and the sacrifice sometimes required of such honor. The Warrior, the vanished tribe and Hongi’s quest are all part of the same look at violence, nobility and obligation.