Sixty-five million years ago, Dinosaurs ruled the Earth. These massive beasts existed for about 180 million years and came in all shapes and sizes, before finally going extinct following a cataclysmic event that forever changed our world and rendered these creatures mere fossils to be discovered and studied. Fittingly, “Dinosaur Day” is actually celebrated twice a year, giving dino fans the world over ample opportunities to pay homage to this near-mythical titans.
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Released: 23 May 1997
Director: Steven Spielberg
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Budget: $73 million
Stars: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vanessa Lee Chester, Pete Postlethwaite, Vince Vaughn, and Arliss Howard
The Plot:
Four years after escaping from Isla Nubar and left disgraced after speaking out about the chaotic events on Jurassic Park, Doctor Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) is forced to head to the park’s “Site B”, Isla Sorna, to rescue his girlfriend, Doctor Sarah Harding (Moore). However, Malcolm’s worst fears about the genetically engineered dinosaurs soon come to pass when the immoral InGen seek to transport them from the island and to a new attraction in downtown San Diego!
The Background:
It was only fitting that Steven Spielberg helmed the big-budget adaptation of Michael Crichton’s bestselling Jurassic Park (ibid, 1990) since the book quickly caught Spielberg’s eye and, thanks to inspirations from classic movie monsters and special effects wizards Stan Winston, Phil Tippett, and Dennis Muren, created not only one of the biggest blockbuster releases of all time but also pioneered many of the CGI techniques we still see in Hollywood today. Bolstered by a huge merchandising campaign, Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993) grossed over $1.030 billion at the box office and was swamped with overwhelmingly positive reviews, so naturally there was a talk of a sequel. However, both Crichton and Spielberg were reluctant to work on a direct follow-up; Crichton due to having never written a sequel before and Spielberg due to a general fatigue from big-budget productions. After Crichton caved to fan demand and began writing a second book, however, Spielberg and writer David Koepp began pre-production on the sequel, which ditched Spielberg’s initial ideas and differed noticeably from the book of the same title to feature a more dramatic and visually entertaining finale that Spielberg originally envisioned for a potential third movie.
Although the Film featured an entirely new cast of characters, Jeff Goldblum was elevated to the leading man (despite his character dying in the original book) and a slew of new dinosaurs were added to the script alongside fan favourites like the Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex. While the film still utilised a number of practical effects and animatronics, far more emphasis was placed on digital creations from the likes of Industrial Light & Magic and Stan Winston to bring these extinct titans to life. Two of the film’s biggest effects sequences involve the T. rex, with one having the actors dangling precariously over a cliff edge in the pouring rain and the other showcasing the T. rex rampaging through downtown San Diego, both of which required the use of miniatures, animatronics, and CGI to make everything work seamlessly. Like its predecessor, The Lost World: Jurassic Park was accompanied by a massive marketing campaign and, while its $618.6 million box office was noticeably less than the first film, it still broke several box office records and became the second highest-grossing film of 1997. Reviews, however, were somewhat mixed; critics were impressed by the special effects but disappointed by the characterisations. While Jeff Goldblum’s performance and the larger role of the T. rex was praised, even Spielberg felt the film failed to match expectations and the film is generally regarded as being inferior to the original. While its reputation is far stronger than that of its third entry, it wouldn’t be until 2015 that the franchise once again properly wowed audiences.
The Review:
I mentioned in my review of Jurassic Park that I didn’t care for the book; I found it dry and dull and lacking in the visual spectacle offered by the big-screen adaptation, which took the concept and filtered out all the boring waffle and focused on overdelivering on the concept of dinosaurs being brought back to life through genetic engineering. If you’re hoping that I preferred The Lost World then you’re sadly mistaken; I found it to be just as bad, and actually worse in a lot of ways as it was essentially the exact same book except there were a few different characters and the they had a bigger, fancier truck. While a standout supporting character in the first film for his eccentric personality and scene-chewing performance, Dr. Ian Malcolm is now thrust into the spotlight. Despite his injuries from the first film, he’s physically fine but his reputation is in the gutter as he refused to adhere to the non-disclosure agreement he signed before visiting Jurassic Park and was branded a fraud as a result. Already a somewhat cynical individual, Malcolm is incensed to learn that Doctor John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) had a second dinosaur island all along, a far less restrictive breeding ground where the dinos would be incubated and bred before being transported to the main park. While Malcolm is no longer prone to expositing Chaos Theory, he’s still just as prone to judging Hammond’s poor decision-making skills and inability to understand or recognise that he’s still tampering with powers outside of his control. Vehemently refusing to visit the island and vowing to warn off the team that Hammond has convinced to document the thriving dinosaurs, Malcolm’s objections turn to fear and panic when he learns that his girlfriend, Sarah, is already there, pushing him to lead a rescue mission.
A running thread throughout the film is Malcolm’s repeated attempts to warn those around him of how dangerous the dinosaurs and Hammond’s islands are and everyone simply ignoring him; if they’re not outright dismissing his claims as paranoia, they’re fixated on the wonderous nature of witnessing dinosaurs up close and personal, meaning he gets multiple chances to rub it in their faces when his warnings turn out to be true and to feel further vindication of his objections when the body count rises. Although he spent much of Jurassic Park doped up on morphine, he brings with him knowledge and experience of the dinosaur’s habits, nature, and aggressive tendencies that are repeatedly ignored, leading to people constantly provoking or antagonising the dinosaurs and incurring their territorial wrath as a result. Even Sarah, despite having heard all of Malcolm’s horror stories, completely waves off his concerns for her safety; an experienced wildlife photographer, she leapt at the chance to document the dinosaurs in the wild and seemed to be confident to the point of arrogance in her ability to stay out of sight and undetected. While it can be argued that Malcolm’s frantic search for her was to blame for disrupting this and almost causing her to be killed by a herd of Stegosaurus, Sarah’s common sense and intelligence is somewhat unpredictable throughout the film; she chastises Nick Van Owen (Vaughn) when he rescues a baby T. rex from being used as bait to satisfy the corporate desires of Hammond’s nephew, Peter Ludlow (Howard), she doesn’t hesitate to help fix its broken leg and doesn’t realise until it’s far too late that her shirt is covered in the baby’s blood and thus attracting the attention of the adult T. rex’s. while Malcolm would rather never set foot on a dinosaur island ever again and Ludlow’s team are determined to transport them to a zoo in San Diego, Sarah is one of the many voices calling for the dinosaurs to be left to thrive in their own unique ecosystem and views them with an awe and respect that turns to abject terror as the more ferocious dinos begin hounding them. Malcolm’s desperation to get her off the island and to safety is so great that it means missing out on time with one of his many daughters, Kelly Curtis (Chester), a pouty and ignorant teenage girl who simultaneous adores and resents her fair-weather father after a lifetime of unreliability. Partially out of spite and partially as a lark, she sneaks her way onto the island and is a constant burden thanks to her argumentative, oblivious impetuousness. She does, however, eventually prove to be somewhat useful when she (or, at least, her stunt double) uses her gymnastics skills to kick a ‘raptor out a window but this is the one time she does anything worthwhile and it’s probably the most unrealistic and overly elaborate aspect of the entire film.
One thing The Lost World isn’t short on is characters; the movie is absolutely stuffed with actors as we follow Malcom’s rescue team and Ludlow’s capture team, following their different experiences on the island and seeing their storylines converge. Malcolm joins Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff) and Nick as they prepare to join Sarah on the island; Eddie is the field expert, though his satellite phone is more than a little temperamental and his “High-Hide” seems laughably impractical since it’d put its inhabitants in easy biting reach but actually proves quite effective during the T. rex attack. The team has this big, decked out truck full of all the equipment that require but it mainly exists to dangle precariously over a cliff while the T. rex makes a meal out of poor Eddie, and the movie expects us to believe that Vince Vaughn, of all people, is this bad-ass animal right activist sent by Hammond to disrupt Ludlow’s efforts to get the dinosaurs off the island. He succeeds only in disrupting their operating, endangering and indirectly costing the lives of many of Ludlow’s team through his actions, but we’re encouraged to root for him because he knows the value of the dinosaur’s lives and rights to freedom and Ludlow’s group is a little disreputable in their methods and motives. Ludlow himself is every slimy, corporate sleazebag you’ve ever known; while Hammond at least had some appreciation of the grandeur and beauty of his creations, Ludlow is concerned only with the bottom line and getting Jurassic Park – San Diego up and running to make a tidy profit. His troop is primarily made up of an assortment of unnamed victims and mercenaries, with Dieter Stark (Peter Stormare) being a rare standout for his cruelty to a Compsognathus which comes back to literally bite him when he’s separated from the others and viciously attacked by a pack of the tiny dinos. The sole standout of Ludlow’s team is veteran big-game hunter Roland Tembo (Postlethwaite); having hunted every animal on the face of the Earth and longing for the chance to hunt a male T. rex, Roland is largely dismissive of Ludlow’s dreams and the promise of financial compensation and a somewhat ambivalent character since he sees the jaunt as just another job. However, he shows an attentive side towards Sarah, a desire to shield Kelly from any death, and is so devastated by the death of his best friend, Ajay Sidhu (Harvey Jason), that he abandons his lifestyle completely after bagging his prize, finding no joy in his victory and having grown weary of being surrounded by death.
Once again, though, it’s the dinosaurs who are the real stars of the show and what we all came to see. The film starts somewhat similarly to the last one with a dinosaur attack but, this time, it’s the Compies who get the opening kill in a sequence actually lifted from the first book and which establishes right away that the dinosaurs are not afraid of man and can attack without provocation. There are a number of new dinosaurs in the film, including a fiercely protective Stegosaurus herd and a stampede of rampaging Pachycephalosaurus, whose powerful headbutt is played for laughs as Roland desperately tries to remember the names of the dinosaurs while capturing them. Many of the smaller and less aggressive dinosaurs are quickly rounded up by Roland and his team and showcased by Ludlow to InGen’s investors, but Nick sets them all three and causes them to run wild through the enemy camp, and decides the best course of action when finding the injured, captured baby T. rex is to bring it to their trailer for medical attention. Although Sarah has to guess the dosage of pain medication and Malcolm is concerned that the baby’s cries will attract its parents, the baby T. rex is patched up and returned to its parents, but the adult T. rex’s are driven to attack the trailer, driving it over the edge, and continue to hound the human characters as they desperately try to escape the island. Along the way, they have to pass through a large expanse of tall grass teeming with Velociraptors, which have a surprisingly subdued role in this film; in the first one, they were very much the primary antagonistic dinosaur but, while they are responsible for a pretty high body count here and deliver one of the film’s more terrifying sequences as they pounce on the characters as they race across the grass, they’re used sparingly this time around. The T. rex crops back up a couple more times, drawn to the scent of its offspring, leading to a harrowing sequence where it tramples people to death underfoot and gulps down InGen’s dinosaur expert and walking dino exposition machine Doctor Robert Burke (Thomas F. Duffy) after he’s spooked by a snake, of all things. In the end, Roland is successfully able to capture alive T.rex but it…somehow…manages to kill off an entire ship’s crew and then return to the cargo hold to make its dramatic appearance once the ship reaches San Diego so it can go on a rampage through the city.
The Nitty-Gritty:
It’s a shame that The Lost World never followed up on the lingering plot thread of the cannister of dinosaurs samples stolen and dropped in the first film; this could’ve been a natural jumping off point for Hammond’s rivals to be behind the new island and thus take Ludlow’s place as the main antagonists, which would’ve have changed the film all that much but would’ve felt a little more natural. The plot point of Hammond’s nephew trying to usurp and exceed his aspirations is somewhat interesting, as it shows there’s division within InGen, but I find it difficult to believe that Hammond is so wealthy that he can buy not one, but two islands, kit them out with all the facilities and equipment they need, and also just abandon a San Diego zoo project beforehand. And even if he could do all that, the losses and financial backlash caused from abandoning these projects, losing all of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs to the lysine contingency, and presumably compensating or covering up the deaths from the last film would’ve surely bankrupted or heavily crippled InGen. Of course, this doesn’t happen and we get to visit Site B, which is where the dinosaurs were properly bred before being transported to Jurassic Park; the island is a curiosity to the likes of Hammond and Sarah as, despite all the odds, the dinosaurs have been able to adapt and thrive there, changing sex to breed and overcoming their lysine deficiency and finding a way to survive without the interference of their human breeders, but for Malcolm it’s just another example of Hammond’s arrogance and a place no one should ever willingly visit due to the inherent danger posed by nature itself.
On paper, The Lost World has everything it needs to be bigger and better than the first film; more cannon fodder to add to the body count, more dinosaurs, and more action should’ve meant that it was even more of a visual spectacle and, in many ways, it is. The dinosaurs still look fantastic and, thanks to many of the bigger action sequence staking place at night and/or in the rain, they’re just as believable as ever and even more formidable. We get not one, but two T. rex’s, there are more instances of herds of dinosaurs grazing, living, or running in the wild, and the final shot even shows all kinds of different species living side by side in their makeshift ecosystem. However, the film suffers from incredibly dull pacing; it’s only a few minutes longer than the last film but it drags so much and so often that even the big dinosaur sequences can’t save it and I find myself tuning out and growing bored waiting for something to happen and to care about these characters. The story is just far too bloated; there’s too many throwaway mercenaries on Ludlow’s team, too few interesting and engaging characters in general, and even the amazing Jeff Goldblum can’t carry this to an enjoyable experience. In fact, he’s actually something of a detriment here; rather than playing an eccentric character, he’s just full-on quirky Goldblum and it’s actually quite distracting. Neither the always-dreadful Vince Vaughn or the incredibly miscast and aggravating Vanessa Lee Chester make for compelling performances and, if it wasn’t for Pete Postlethwaite, there wouldn’t be anyone interesting at all in the cast.
It’s a shame as the dinosaur sequences can be very entertaining; The Lost World is much more of a horror/monster film than its more subdued predecessor, even though numerous attempts are made to emphasise that the dinosaurs are just acting out of instinct and to protect their young and territory. The T. rex’s rip poor Eddie to shreds, squash nameless goons, and tear limbs off; one even eats a dog during the finale, which is always a step too far, and yet Nick goes out of his way to take Roland’s bullets away from him! The Compie attack, while somewhat comical, end sup being pretty terrifying as Stark is eaten alive just out of frame and the ‘raptor attack in the grass is an equally tense and distressing sequence sadly undermined by Kelly’s ridiculous athletics. The finale, which sees a T. rex go on a rampage in downtown San Diego, feels unnaturally tacked on (mainly because it was…) and I’m torn between wishing we’d seen more stuff like that to differentiate the sequel from the original or omitting it entirely. It does result in some of the best looking shots of the film; the juxtaposition of this massive, prehistoric beast barrelling down the street, crushing cars, and chomping on terrifying pedestrians is quite striking, but it’s very rushed and by the time it happens you’re just wanting begging for the movie to be over. In the end, Malcolm and Sarah manage to retrieve the baby T. rex and use it to lure its Mama or Papa (it’s not really made clear which it is) back to the boat, where Ludlow is left in the cargo hold as a tasty snack for their journey back to the island. It’s not made clear who, if anyone, is piloting the boat back but the incident becomes public knowledge, bringing a mainstream awareness of the island and the existence of dinosaurs, but the movie ends with Hammond imploring mankind to take a step back and let life find a way, which is presented as though he’s finally learned a lesson but could just as easily be an attempt to once again avoid any legal repercussions for his research.
The Summary:
When I was a kid, The Lost World: Jurassic Park was my favourite of the Jurassic Park films; the first one had been such a spectacle and made such a huge impression that anticipation was high for the sequel and I think I associated the success and appeal of the first movie to mean the sequel had to be just as good, if not better. I was (and still am) a massive Jeff Goldblum fan as well, so that just added to the appeal of the sequel since he took a lead role, but it can’t be denied that The Lost World is inferior in almost every aspect. Even the dinosaurs don’t always look as good; the CGI, while still impressive, is far more noticeable in a lot of shots, even though the animatronics and the likes of the T. rex look fantastic as ever. Unfortunately, the film is overstuffed with uninteresting, forgettable characters, bland and uninspiring performances, and is such a slog to get through that I find myself growing increasingly bored every time I watch it. The spectacle and allure is just missing, or dulled, despite how hard the film tries to recapture the magic of the first movie; it’s much more like a generic monster film in a lot of ways and borrows a little too much from the last film to really stand out. The areas where it is a bit more unique are sadly underdeveloped; the idea of a rival company building their own dinosaur island or theme park could’ve been interesting, as could dinosaurs running amok in the city, but it’s all just kind of crammed in here with very little rhyme or reason and not sense of urgency. It’s a shame, really, as there was such potential in a Jurassic Park sequel, but there’s just very little substance to The Lost World; it’s still technically very impressive at times and it has moments where its bigger and more impressive than the last film, but it falls flat overall and ends up being this plodding, lifeless affair filled with inane characters, bone-headed decisions, and lacklustre action that feels too much like a desperate, corporate attempt to make lightning strike twice rather than a genuine attempt to match the spectacle and wonder of its predecessor.
My Rating:
Could Be Better
What did you think to The Lost World: Jurassic Park? Do you think I’m being too harsh on it and that it’s actually just as good, if not better, than the first film? Are you a fan of the book and, if so, did you still enjoy the film or was there too much changed in the adaptation process? Were you happy to see Ian Malcolm return and which of the new characters was your favourite? What’s your favourite dinosaur, either in this film or in general? Were you a fan of the finale or do you agree that the film suffered from pacing issues? Which of Jurassic Park’s sequels is your favourite or do you consider the first one to be the best? How are you celebrating Dinosaur Day this year? Whatever your thoughts on The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and dinosaurs in general, sign up to leave them below or drop a comment on my social media.
