THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1997) **1/2 (out of four)
THE LOST WORLD is one of those rare movies we all go to see because we think we have to. There are one or two of these every year, and each one seems a bigger `event' than the last one. These movies aren't really any better than most of the other ones we line up to see, but for these – and God knows why – we'll stand in line twice as long and take cramped seats in crowded theaters. THE LOST WORLD is the only sequel to an event movie that's been a bigger event than the original. And, as usual, none of us know why.
This is Steven Spielberg's first film since Schindler's List. >From looking at it, he must have taken a nice three-year vacation, because he certainly wasn't throwing all that work into THE LOST WORLD. By now, Spielberg and the audience know how these action sequels go. The returning characters know they're dooming themselves to more near-death experiences for no good reason, but they go anyway. Kind of like all of us lining up to see the movies themselves.
Lost in the LOST WORLD casting this time around are Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Samuel L. Jackson. The only ones to return are Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough and those two bratty kids. Luckily, the last three are limited to a cameo appearances at the beginning and end. Attenborough's purpose in the sequel is the same – he has to be the idiot who sends humans into the dinosaurs' natural environment. This time, he's converted `from capitalist to naturalist,' interested only in the welfare of the surviving dinosaurs.
The original JURASSIC PARK island has been destroyed, but naturally there is a `Site B' island not mentioned in the first movie. Lots and lots of computer-generated dinosaurs, and Attenborough wants to send a team of experts in there to endorse the habitat, or else his board of directors will wrestle control away from him. You see, things are already going wrong on the hidden island. A little girl was attacked by a group of tiny dinosaurs. She lived, of course. Little girls don't die in these movies.
He wants Goldblum to be one of the four to go onto the island, but of course Goldblum resists, remembering the T-Rex attack the last time he listened to Attenborough. I was wondering just how stupid he'd have to be to agree to set foot on another dino-infested island, when a convenient plot device was thrown in. Goldblum's paleontologist girlfriend (Julianne Moore) is already on the island, jumping at the chance to study real live extinct dinosaurs. So he has to go protect her personally.
Goldblum heads to the island in a camouflage Mercedes with a photographer and some other guy. It's a bad sign that we have no idea about this third guy – bad for him, anyway. It means he becomes dino-meat before the end of the first hour. There's also a stowaway; Goldblum's young daughter hides in the equipment trailer, eager for a chance to bond with Dad. God knows there's no better way to get close to your parents than running from velociraptors together.
And, in another Michael Crichton plot twist left over from TWISTER, there's a rival team of experts in the picture, but these guys aren't good because they're only interesting in harnessing the dinosaurs for physical profit. That means lots of victims for the dinosaurs. One of them, heaven forbid, has come for the sole purpose of killing a Tyrannosaurus. It's the ultimate macho hunting expedition for him and, sure, this is pathetic, but are we really supposed to hate him for capturing a baby T-Rex and using it as bait for the adult? I mean, come on, Tyrannosaurs aren't choir boys; they're deadly killers. They ate that lawyer in the first movie.
Things move pretty slowly for the first hour or so, like the original JURASSIC PARK, although the slow parts of the first film were interesting because they explained the processes for bringing dinosaurs back to life. It was educational; I was able to resurrect a stegosaurus in my backyard the very next week. This time we have a little bickering between Goldblum and Moore and Goldblum and the daughter.
It's bad filler, and the action scenes aren't a whole lot better. There's a tired 20-minute scene with two T-Rexes trying to push the trailer (with Goldblum, Moore and the photographer inside) over a cliff. In grand action flick tradition, the trailer hangs precariously for a few minutes while the three of them almost fall out of it, then the three hang from a rope for a few minutes and almost fall from that. A whole eighth of the movie is wasted on this one tired sequence.
THE LOST WORLD can't match JURASSIC PARK for sheer action. The entire last half of the first movie was devoted to non-stop action scenes with the dinosaurs and other threats, most of which were genuinely thrilling. This time, some of the stuff seems like a parody of the original. One need only watch the scene with Goldblum's daughter defeating a velociraptor through a gymnastic act on a bar to know what I'm talking about.
The novelty of dinosaurs in the modern-day world has worn off since the last movie; now we need something one step further. What we get from Spielberg is an inferior retread of the first movie, minus most of the characters. It's mostly second-rate, including a climax in which one of the Tyrannosaurs gets loose in modern-day San Diego. Nothing we haven't seen in 30 Godzilla movies. Let's just hope Spielberg's next project isn't a sequel to SCHINDLER'S LOST, although he could use the same slogan as THE LOST WORLD: `something has survived.'
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