THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Universal) Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Vanessa Lee Chester, Vince Vaughn. Screenplay: David Koepp, based on the novel by Michael Crichton. Producers: Gerald R. Molen and Colin Wilson. Director: Steven Spielberg. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, violence) Running Time: 127 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Four years ago, a friend of mine explained very succinctly the reason he was looking forward to Steven Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK: "Big mechanical lizards." Sure, the lizards in question were not entirely mechanical, but I got the point. He wanted to see dinosaurs live and breathe on the big screen, as did millions of other movie-goers around the world. Four years and over a billion dollars in worldwide grosses later, everyone has seen dinosaurs live and breathe on the big screen, which begs one major question when considering a sequel: now what?
As it turns out, the "now what" is more: more different kinds of dinosaurs, more scenes of the dinosaurs attacking, more people around to suffer creatively agonizing deaths. It also turns out to be, more or less, more of the same. THE LOST WORLD offers all the shallow characterization and pointless plotting of JURASSIC PARK without the sense of discovery. Only in the hands of Steven Spielberg could that recipe add up to something moderately diverting instead of a compete disaster.
THE LOST WORLD is based on (so loosely as to re-define "based on" as "with the same title as") Michael Crichton's sequel novel, which introduced us to a second island where dinosaurs were being genetically engineered. Unlike Jurassic Park's Isla Nublar, however, Isla Sorna has been allowed to develop as a complete ecosystem, with dinosaurs roaming free of fences or human interference. Unfortunately, InGen Technologies is in some financial trouble, inspiring new boss Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard) to consider exploiting a major corporate resource. Enter John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), now convinced of the error of his ways and determined to prevent further jurassicatastrophies. He recruits a team of researchers to collect evidence for leaving the dinosaurs alone, a team headed by a reluctant Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Once on the island, Malcolm and his crew discover that Ludlow has brought his own team, and that they are on a mission guaranteed to create more death and destruction.
In many ways, THE LOST WORLD is actually an improvement over JURASSIC PARK, if for no other reason than that it is more honest. Spielberg takes exactly two minutes to show us the first dinosaur in THE LOST WORLD, clearly aware that there's no point in creating build-up any longer. He also takes a note from a clever line in David Koepp's script given to Malcolm: "Yeah, ooh ahh...that's always how it starts. Then later comes the running and screaming." JURASSIC PARK was almost obliged to provide the wide-eyed wonder of the completely new; THE LOST WORLD, appropriately, delivers a much higher ratio of "running and screaming" to "ooh ahh." It also doesn't have Laura Dern as a dumber-than-Triceratops-dung paleobotanist, giggling like a schoolgirl over Malcolm's description of chaos theory, or Ariana Richards shrieking about Unix systems.
What THE LOST WORLD _does_ have is a generous helping of scenes and characters which are awfully familiar. Pete Postlethwaite plays this year's version of the Great White Hunter while Arliss Howard plays this year's version of the Corporate Scum; the gallimimus stampede of JP becomes LOST WORLD'S parasauralophus stampede. Though Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello appear only in cameos back on the mainland, there is still a youngster to be terrorized (Malcolm's daughter Kelly, played by Vanessa Lee Chester). Even the sequence of attacks feels derivative: T. rex attacks a vehicle and tries to push it over a cliff, T. rex chases people, people trek toward a distant goal, velociraptors take their turn. JURASSIC PARK was more enjoyable than it should have been because we had never seen this stuff before. LOST WORLD is the same stuff, just in greater quantities.
Those greater quantities are probably going to satisfy movie-goers who like their action fast and furious, with minimal interruption for silly little things like character development. No one will argue that that THE LOST WORLD is much more than a string of set pieces; there is also little question that a few of those set pieces are directed with that indescribable Spielberg something. The first T. rex attack is brilliant, placing Julianne Moore hundreds of feet above the crashing surf, separated from certain death by nothing more than a pane of glass gradually dissolving into spiderweb cracks. When Spielberg is "on," the results can be dizzying, and he's "on" just often enough to give THE LOST WORLD a few satisfying sparks. The rest of the time, he's on auto-pilot. Like us, he's been there and done that.
I believe I have seen JURASSIC PARK four times since its initial release, and I have enjoyed it less each time. If I had seen THE LOST WORLD for the first time in 1993 -- if the order of the two films had been reversed -- I suspect I would have found it positively thrilling. In 1997, it's just like watching JURASSIC PARK for the fifth time, when it's hard to get worked up over a film which has little going for it besides big mechanical lizards.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 lizard kings: 5.
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