Welcome back to “Jurassic Park Month,” where today we will look at a movie that many considered a disappointment, and I can see where they are coming from, “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” released in 1997. I'll tell you the problem with the sequel that Spielberg made here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. He read what others had done and he took the next step. He didn't earn the knowledge for himself, so he didn't take any responsibility for it. He stood on the shoulders of Michael Crichton (who also made a sequel to the book, which I don't own and never even heard of until a few years back. Possibly it was written because fans wanted him to) to accomplish something as fast as he could, and before he even knew what he had, he patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic DVD cover, and now (I slam my hand on my table) he’s selling it, he wants to sell it.
Where is the awe? Where is the sense that if dinosaurs really walked the earth, a film about them would be more than a monster movie? Where are all the surprising reactions? “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” demonstrates way more visibly than “Jurassic Park” that the fundamental material is so promising. It deserves a story not written on autopilot. Steven Spielberg, a talented director, should have once again imagined the material, should have seen it through the eyes of someone looking at dinosaurs, rather than through the eyes of someone looking at a box-office sequel.
The movie is well done from a technical viewpoint, of course. The dinosaurs look amazingly real, and we see them dive into the middle of 360-degree action. A man on a motorcycle even rides between the legs of a running dinosaur. It can be said that the creatures in this film goes beyond any visible signs of special effects and seem to walk this planet. However, the same realism isn’t brought to the human characters, who are leapt by plot conventions and action formulas, and scripted to do vacuous things so that they can be chased and sometimes eaten by the dinosaurs.
Maybe it was already too late. Perhaps the time to do the thinking on this project was before the first film, when all the possibilities are in front of Spielberg. He should have thrown away the original Michael Crichton novel, knowing it had given him only one thing of use: an explanation for why dinosaurs might walk before us. Everything else – the scientific babble, the theme park plan – was just the garbage of other movies. We already know the tired old plot lessons, about man’s greed and pride, and how it is punished, and why there is no consequence to get in the way of Mother Nature.
I think I agree with Roger Ebert when he asked, “Why not a pseudo-documentary in which the routine plot elements are simply ignored, and the characters venture into the unknown and are astonished and frightened by what they find?” There are moments in the first “Jurassic Park” that captures a legitimate sense of wonder, the first time we see the stylish, eye-popping prehistoric animals moving in majestically calm beyond the trees. However, soon they are scaring the human characters, as in any monster movie.
“The Lost World” is even more mechanical. The plot gives up a reason for Ian Malcolm, reprised by Jeff Goldblum, to return to an island where dinosaurs survive. His girlfriend, played by Julianne Moore, is already there. He takes along an equipment specialist (Richard Schiff) and a “video documentarian” (Vince Vaughn, who has got to be one of the nicest men out there, but his character comes equipped with a tiny tourist toy of a video camera and doesn’t seem sure how to use it). They land on the island, are soon taking photos of these prehistoric animals, and the screenplay is so careless that the newcomers to the plot are not even allowed to show their surprise the first time they see their victim.
A good majority of the film, especially the action scenes, is shot at night in the rain. Ebert mentioned, “I assume that's to provide better cover for the special effects; we see relatively few dinosaurs in bright light, and the conceit is taken so far that even the press conference announcing a new dinosaur park in San Diego is held in the middle of the night.” The night scenes also allow Spielberg to use his most familiar visual trademark, the visible beams from powerful flashlights, but apart from that cliché, Spielberg doesn’t really seem there in the movie: This feels like the type of sequel a skillful man hands over to their student, and you sense that although much effort was abundant on the special effects, Spielberg’s interest in the story was mechanical.
Here’s the fact to the movie’s weakness: Many complicated scenes exist only to be…complicated sequences. In a better movie, they would play a role in this story. Consider the drawn-out episode of the lifeless research trailer, for example, which hangs over a cliff while the characters hang over a terrifying drop and a hero tries to save the trailer from falling, while a dinosaur attacks. This is only what it appears to be, an action scene, nothing more. It doesn’t lead into or out of anything, and is superfluous, except to be filler in the runtime. It plays like an admission that the filmmakers couldn’t think of something more interesting involving the real story line.
Also, consider the character of Goldblum’s daughter, played by Vanessa Lee Chester. Why is she here? To be put in danger, to inspire contrived household disagreements, and to make demands so that the plot can get from A to B. At one point, inside the trailer, she gets scared and says immediately that she “wants to go someplace real high – right now! Right now!” Ebert mentioned, “So Goldblum and another character put her in a cage that lifts them above the forest, after which Goldblum must descend from the cage, after which I was asking why they had ascended in it in the first place. (Early in the film, it is established that the girl is a gymnast; later the film observes the ancient principle that every gymnast in a movie sooner or later encounters a bar.)” There are some moments that work. Pete Postlethwaite, as a big game hunter who flies onto the island with a second wave of dinosaur private armies, doesn’t step wrong. He plays a convincing if shallow character, even if he’s called upon to make long-winded speeches in speeding Jeeps, and to say creative lines about “movable feasts” and having “spent enough time in the company of death.” He alone among the major characters seems convinced that he is on an island with dinosaurs, and not merely in a special-effects movie about them.
The film’s structure is weird. Ebert mentioned, “I thought it was over, and then it began again, with a San Diego sequence in which Spielberg seemed to be trying to upstage the upcoming "Godzilla'' movie. The monster-stepping-on-cars sequences in the current Japanese import "Gamera: Guardian of the Universe'' are more entertaining.” Can we really believe that a ship could crash into a pier at full speed and remain seaworthy? The problem with the movie is that the dinosaurs aren’t allowed to be the stars. They’re fabulously imagined and executed, but no attempt is made to understand their awesomeness. Much of the plot centers on mother and father T-Rexes exhibiting parental feelings for their offspring. Must we see everything in human terms? At one point, one character tells another, “These creatures haven’t walked the earth for tens of millions of years, and now all you want do is shoot them?” Somebody could have asked Spielberg the same question.
I don’t really recommend this one because it’s nowhere near as awesome as the first one was. Besides the dinosaur effects looking great, but not as amazing as the first one, the story in this movie has you scratching your head thinking, “Why are they making another “King Kong” rip-off with a set up to that horrible “Godzilla” movie that came out the next year?” If you want to give this sequel a pass, you may.
How is the third one in this series? Is it worse or better than this one? Find out next week in “Jurassic Park Month” to know what I thought.
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