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| The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) |
Right off the bat, I have to mention how much of a downgrade the visual effects are here, which is curious, since this film came out 6 years after the original, and you'd think the effects would get better with time. However, while the practical effects are still fantastic, there are far more computer-generated effects than the original. And, I don't have a problem with CGI in these movies, but contrasted with the practical effects, they stick out like a sore thumb. They went about 50/50 with practical and CGI, and that, unfortunately, makes it incredibly noticeable and a little ugly when they switch to CG. The blend was far better in the first film, and I could barely ever tell which effects were which. Here, it's fine enough when they get into San Diego, but on the island, especially during the day, it's a little pathetic. The soundtrack is still a big win, so there's that, and the remixes of the main theme all send shivers down my spine when I hear them. You all know I love it when a soundtrack makes use of a recurring motif, and this nailed that to a tee.
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| Tyrannosaurus rex |
Unfortunately, the main place this movie falls apart is its plot. The whole thing just feels like a paint-by-numbers of the original Jurassic Park movie, and I don't mean just that people get sent to an island with dinosaurs. It's almost uncanny at times. Did we have our scene with T. rex attacking cars in the rain? Cool. Do we have a scene with the T. rex barely keeping pace while the humans outrun it (which makes less sense here since the people are clearly much slower than the jeep was and, if anything, this T. rex would be faster since it hasn't been living in captivity)? Cool. Did we get our scene with the raptors stalking our heroes through a building? Cool. Really, while on the island, the movie is just a bunch of action scenes strung together with barely enough set-up to justify them. And, that was basically the first film as well, but all the set-up in that was brilliantly integrated into the plot itself, not just for the sake of moments. Each moment leads into the next, which isn't the case here. And, again, some of those action moments in this film are so hastily set up that it's actually lazy. An entire action sequence happens because some guy had headphones on. That's pathetic when compared to the original and how it wove together all the reasons that the park would fall to the dinosaurs.
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| Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm |
And the characters are hardly as compelling. Ian Malcolm returns, and he's fine, I guess, though he's basically just turned into a one-liner machine, which would be fine if the lines themselves were good, but they're hardly worth remembering. Case in point: I can only remember one of them, and I'm positive there were at least five here. That said, I do like his relationship with his daughter, and even with Sarah. Speaking of Sarah, she's played well enough by Moore, but I just do not like this character. She makes so many poor decisions throughout the film that I can't be on board with her. Taking a wailing baby T. rex back to your base camp is stupid, especially since her whole theory was that T. rex had paternal instincts and would obviously search out their baby. And, then, an entire action scene happens and someone dies because she doesn't answer the phone. But, by far, the worst offense is when she gets T. rex blood on her jacket, and despite knowing the T. rex would become fiercely territorial, keeps wearing the jacket for a whole day, maybe more, allowing the T. rex to track down the camp, which leads to the deaths of dozens of people. And, I know that in the previous review, I mentioned that people making the wrong choice is fine if its a character flaw, but this is absolutely not that. She's supposed to be an expert on observing predators in the wild, apparently having decades of experience in the field, so why does she keep making these amateur mistakes? It's saying something that she causes more deaths than Dennis Nedry in the first film, and he's supposed to be the antagonist of his film. The other characters are fine enough, Vince Vaughn is pretty good, though by far my favourite character is Richard Schiff as Eddie. I don't know what it is, he just felt so natural here.
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| Julianne Moore as Sarah Harding |
The final place this film falls flat is in its environmental messages its trying to get across. Putting aside the fact that it can be somewhat ham-fisted at times, the actions of the characters in the film almost paint the opposite message. The hunters are the ones that save the hero characters from certain death, and it's the hero characters who are opposed to hunting that keep putting the hunters in imminent mortal danger. Along with the bloody jacket from earlier, Vince Vaughn's character actively goes out of his way to take away as many of the hunters' defences as possible. Yes, bullets aren't a defence, but they sort of are when it's keeping you from being killed yourself as opposed to just killing for the fun of it. Also, the animals the heroes are trying to protect are all blood-thirsty killing machines, and in a survival situation, you kind of need those bullets. The film tries to pull off a 'they're not monsters, they're animals', but the film still treats them like monsters, building suspense towards their arrival the way a monster movie would, and killing innocent civilians. By that point, once they've starting hunting innocent people, you can't really play to that angle anymore. That said, the scene in San Diego is actually very well executed, and once the T. rex is loose in the streets, it's terrifying, but even this moment is undercut by the way they set it up. How the f*** did the T. rex get loose, kill the entire crew (including people in rooms it could not possibly have fit in), and then get itself back into the hull for it to be released later? See what I'm talking about? The entire film is a series of cool moments with very little thought put into actually getting to those moments effectively.
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| Vince Vaughn as Nick van Owen |
That's what stops The Lost World: Jurassic park (1997) from living up to the excitement of the original, or even from being what I'd consider a 'good' movie. I'm willing to judge it a little higher than I probably should just because those moments are effective at times, but you can just look up those individual moments on YouTube and you'd honestly be better off. 4.5/10
Next: Jurassic Park III
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