THE LOST WORLD (1992)
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: This LOST WORLD starts well, but
pulls all the wrong punches and replaces dramatic
tension with political correctness. Rent the
restoration of the 1925 version. It will have to
do until some director makes a serious attempt at a
sound adaptation of the Doyle novel. Rating: low 0
(-4 to +4)
Arthur Conan Doyle's novel THE LOST WORLD was only fourteen years old when it was first adapted to film in 1925, yet the silent version remains the definitive version. The story concerns an expedition to a high South American plateau isolated and insulated from the effects of evolution, where vicious prehistoric ape-men live together with live dinosaurs. Considering the subject matter--the dinosaurs, the ape-men, the action and adventure--one would think that in the seventy years since then it would have had much better adaptations, but sadly, with all its faults, the 1925 film remains the only reasonably faithful adaptation. The 1960 version had little respect for the original story and in addition for dinosaurs it used lizards that were a long way from resembling the real thing. I had heard that there was a Canadian version made, but could not find out much about it until it showed up in my local video store.
The film was made in 1992 together with RETURN TO THE LOST WORLD, a film with the same director and cast. The director is Timothy Bond who had directed, in Canada, a chilling 1976 TV-movie, DEADLY HARVEST. That film depicted in frightening detail the results of a famine coming to Canada. The intervening sixteen years must not have been good for Bond's directorial style. The realistic style of that film is just what is missing from his new THE LOST WORLD.
The film actually starts fairly well with reporter Edward Malone (played by Eric McCormack) looking for a dangerous assignment and being sent to interview the obstreperous Dr. George Edward Challenger (John Rhys-Davies). Sequences here are taken directly from the book and raise hopes for a faithful adaptation. Things start going wrong when the script moves the lost plateau from South America to Central Africa. This was done, no doubt, because the filmmakers got a better deal shooting in Zimbabwe than they could have gotten shooting on the Amazon. The story then replaces Doyle's game-hunting Lord John Roxton with conservationist suffragette and wildlife photographer, Jenny Nielson (Tamara Gorski) and a thirteen-year-old cub reporter Jim (Darren Peter Mercer). Doyle's version of Professor Challenger would absolutely not abide a woman or a child on the expedition, but someone felt the film needed kid-identification value as well as a female role-model. In this version Challenger is impressed by the plucky proto-feminist. In fact, just about everybody turns out to be wonderful in this version. Challenger turns out to be wonderful, his bitter competitor Summerlee turns out to be wonderful. The wildlife of Africa is wonderful. The Africans the expedition runs into are wonderful. The rubbery dinosaurs are wonderful. (Well, the herbivores are and the carnivores never pose much of a threat.) The ape-men on the plateau would never think of throwing their enemies over the sides of the plateau the way Doyle had envisioned them. They aren't really ape-men either, but enlightened primitives who just need to be understood. There is one nasty villain in the film--you'll know him right away because he isn't pretty like the other people. He's a white (albeit Hispanic) male, of course. You can tell just by looking at him that he is a villain. It is amazing that this film can be as faithful to the plot of the novel as it is and at the same time be so lacking in the novel's dramatic tension. The story has the right shape, but every sharp edge has been rounded off and sanded down.
The effects work is spotty. A carnivore head at one point is actually fairly good, but a baby pterodactyl that shows up more often is horribly cutsey and looks like something out of a cartoon. At least the 1960 version never got your hopes up that it would be a good film. It is bad from the first scene. The fact that the 1992 film really does have a few good moments only makes the film more frustrating. I rate this version a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews