Treasure Hunting is Neocolonial. Can the film genre outgrow this?
Written by Mia Amelie
The Lost City hits all the right notes to join the adventure-romance genre foray: beauty, chemistry, and intrigue for the environment and persons involved. Like 1951’s The African Queen, 1984’s Romancing the Stone, and 1999’s The Mummy, The Lost City depicts Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock in a tried-and-true formula: an adorable himbo anda formidable brain gal at odds enrapture enough to shift focus away from their actual endeavors. The pair have appealbecause of their adventure into the wild – reminiscent of The Mummy’s young Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz or Jungle Cruise’s Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt – where outsiders face high stakes in exotic, non-Western locations. What piqued my interest during Lost City was its candor to explicitly acknowledge past decimation of Native and Indigenous peoples and their land.
Since Indiana Jones, a legacy of Eurocentrism and the linkage of wilderness to whiteness has informed the treasure-hunting adventure film. Colonization informed how the devaluing of land and its people became interchangeable. European colonization birthed the Western “travel” narrative cliches of “virgin forests” waiting to be “explored” and “wild” (read: Indigenous). Indigenous people are often erased in discussions of history and memory whereby settler colonialism subjugated the land and its original inhabitants are entities to be done unto rather than humans. In the nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny birthed the National Park and Reserve system, as well as the colonization of Mexican and indigneous land. Settlers could “[not] enjoy nature without conquering it or without objectifying the land and relegating the rest to nature for ornamental relief.” Escaping to the wilderness has long served as a mechanism to relinquish civilization’s burdens and demands of oneself. In particular, this isolation and distance meant to foster arenaissance or a return to one’s most “primitive” state.
Coincidentally, even casting Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe exemplifies that this settler narrative is alive and well. Rather than cosplaying wannabe Buzz Aldrin billionaire Jeff Bezos, Radcliffe’s Fairfax rejects modernity and embraces tradition: penetrating and pillaging an exotic, remote location. It was probably cheaper to buy Native land than charter a rocket. Radcliffe’s petulant, greedy billionaire wants Bullock’s help to decipher the surprisingly accurate archeological details in her new novel.
Lost City did not offer much staying power like its predecessors and was quite forgettable fun. By the end of the journey, a romantic island anecdote overshadows the El Dorado-esque lore around the treasure. But why was Lorretta’s kidnapping not in tandem to returning relics to the island? Why not search for treasure to be returned to its respective country? Why not explore the land back movement, which seeks to restore stolen land to Indigenous ownership?
Sandra Bullock’s archaeology expertise offers contrition against colonial endeavors that most genre films ignore. By not exoticizing non-Western culture, the film emphasizes the comedic hijinks between its leads rather than a mistreatment of the local population. When Loretta and Alan arrive in a small town, no grandiose celebration welcomes the white foreigners — just a town square where local people congregate. Soon, their short romantic reprieve is disrupted by the local police force on Fairfax’s payroll. The well-worn white man’s approach to environmentalconquest and consumption are prioritized over any community-building. Unfortunately, as our academic, Bullock's few lines about apology and disruption to the local community and environment only feel like ideas tacked on at the last minute, perhaps a checklist critique to the genre
Even more so, traditional ecological and cultural knowledge erasure persists. Lost City’s resident islander Rafi (Héctor Aníbal) gives a few superficial warnings for disrupting the natural environment. But Rafi has no story arc. We have noinsight into his motivations for wanting to help a foreigner further exploit the land. His character, cultural history, and country only serve as a playground for flirtatious and perilous escapism. Similarly, a sex-crazed Oscar Nunez tries to woo Loretta’s Black Best Friend (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), but only for laughs.
Slow emergence from the pandemic has made people understandably desire an exotic space. A slew of recent films (Uncharted, Death on the Nile) deliver escapist fantasies where this voyeurism persists. But “exoticized,” escapist travel has been particularly harmful during the pandemic, when people still travel to Hawai’i despite Kanaka Maoli people's protests to remain in the contiguous United States for fear of water scarcity and tourist destruction to sacred land.
Westworld, during the pandemic, also elevated the worst colonial fantasies against Indigenous peoples, whose continued stewardship is crucial to protecting and preserving the environment. According to the United Nations, although Indigenous people make up five percent of the world’s population, their land contains 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. In this case, a genre film that offers a fuller picture of the culture and community being exploited gives credence to how characters and their identity inform their different lived experiences and the broader impact that neo-colonial films have on very real communities.
Finding Ohana is just that genre film. The Goonies-esque Netflix romp sees two Brooklyn siblings, Pili and Ioane, reconnect with their Kanaka Maoli heritage and family while searching for hidden Spanish treasure on Oʻahu. The dialogue meanders between pidgin English, Hawaiian, and slang that borrows words from Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and Native languages. Though clunky, this code-switching informs how the pair became distanced from their heritage. When a dead relative returns to protect the siblings, the film’s end undoes a genre assumption: that Indigenous peoples are either all dead or frozen in time. Rather than perpetuating the belief that Native peoples only exist as caricature, Finding Ohana depicts a contemporary attempt to reconnect to lands, customs, and cosmologies. Pili and Ioane’s questhas reverence because it is not based on an appropriative hunt. Genre films produced through a similar lens provide an opportunity for local cast and crew to tell more meaningful and authentic stories, and to change portrayals and perceptions.
Lost City cleverly relied on white people’s exaggeration of treasure hunts to carry Bullock, Tatum, and Radcliffe’s storylines. The genre already assumes that “savages” are incapable of creating complex societies without white men showing them. It remains difficult to believe or respect these films when non-Western environments are reduced to dangerous plot points and underdeveloped characters. The lamentations toward bad films can definitely be attributed todepictions that use culture as accessories for consumption.
Mia Amelie works in book publishing. Her research interest focuses on Indigeneity within global hegemonies, environmental racism, and intersectional feminism. She enjoys the writings of Jesmyn Ward and Toni Morrison. In addition to reading and writing, she loves hiking and any excuse to go to the beach. Her work can be found on her Medium or social media.