Subject: REVIEW: THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK (1997)

From: [email-masked] (Scott Renshaw)
Date: 29 May 1997 18:18:47 GMT

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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                     Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage
	        http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
	     Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email
		       See details on the MoviePage
---------------------------------------------------------------------------