Review #935: 'The Lost World: Jurassic Park' (1997)

My main memory of seeing Steven Spielberg's sequel to his 1993 mega-hit Jurassic Park is leaving the cinema with one of the worst migraines I've ever suffered. My head pounded so hard that I couldn't even eat my caramel sundae purchased from the drive-thru McDonalds on the route home. Seeing it again all these years later I approached the film with a clear head and a box of painkillers on hand as a precaution. But as the credits rolled after an exhausting 129 minutes, I found myself in pain yet again. Not pain of the physical kind, but the dull emotional pain of sitting through a pretty bad movie. The Lost World's aim is to make everything bigger and better, and while the dinosaurs are certainly more technically impressive this time, there is little of the original's magic here.

A few years after the incident on Isla Nublar, the InGen corporation are being hit with lawsuit after lawsuit, and former CEO John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is now a naturalist who has seen the error of his ways. When Hammond's slimy nephew (Arliss Howard) takes over the business, he plans to bring the dinosaurs back to the mainland and make them a sideshow attraction. Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is asked by Hammond to visit Isla Sorna, or "site B" - a breeding island where the dinosaurs roamed free - to document the dinosaurs in order to gather support for the island to be left to its own devices by humans. He initially declines, but then has a change of heart when he learns that his palaeontologist girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already there.

Everything is certainly on a larger scale here than its predecessor. Instead of one tyrannosaurus rex we get two and a baby, and there's a whole pack of velociraptors for the group to contend with. Shortly after Malcolm arrives, he and his crew are joined by the Hammond nephew, who brings along a small army and bad-ass hunter Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite), the latter of whom simply wants a shot at taking down a T-Rex as payment for his services. Unfortunately, Malcolm's estranged daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) - a character taken straight out of Cinema's Guide to Annoying Children - also sneaks along for the ride, so we get to suffer through sentimental moments of learning the importance of family. The stand-out scene, which sees the characters attacked by the angry T-Rex's near the edge of a cliff, happens because Sarah takes their baby to bandage a wound. It turns out the dinosaurs value family too.

The fact that Sarah, an expert in her field, would even try to take care of a baby T-Rex demonstrates how stupid these characters are required to be in order for the film to deliver a set-piece. When you know there are huge, angry monsters out there, why would you park your trailer next to a cliff-edge anyway? So concerned is the film with entertaining its audience, Spielberg and writer David Koepp seem to have forgotten that a scene also requires a degree of logic to truly work. Most of the action falls flat, which is surprising given the talent for the genre previously demonstrated by its director, and it culminates in an unnecessary T-Rex rampage around San Diego. It isn't all bad - the dinosaurs are as wonderful and terrifying as ever and the late Postlethwaite is a fantastically conflicted antagonist - but there's a noticeable lack of heart and effort here.


Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Richard Attenborough, Vince Vaughn
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie