The Lost World

I have to admit that I don't really like The Lost World all that much. I think the film's music pretty much sums it up, swapping the trumpet-laden awe and wonder of Jurassic Park's score for attention-getting tribal drums and tension. Spielberg isn't afraid to branch out when it comes to sequels (see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) so he goes more for all-out action in this big adventure. The theme is still very much about the evils of messing with nature, represented by the villains' attempts to control nature through capturing and imprisoning dinosaurs. It's up to Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, returning from the first film) and his wayward girlfriend, Dr Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore, as a character who just so happens to be a paleontologist), to save the day after being lured onto a new dinosaur-ridden island.

I guess the major problem with The Lost World is that, instead of a simple story of characters trying to escape dinosaurs, this sequel has to come up with some rather convoluted ideas just to get some 'good guys' interacting with dinosaurs. Several new characters are introduced, including Vince Vaughn as some kind of dino-freedom fighter and Goldblum's African-American daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester). Kelly serves no real function in the plot whatsoever and I still don't really know why she's in the film. Perhaps the worst piece of characterisation of all is Goldblum's return as Malcolm, here the mathematician is a jittery worrywort who has more in common with Goldblum's character from Independence Day than the rock star-ish character the actor played in Jurassic Park. On the flipside, we get the wonderful Pete Postlethwaite as a great white hunter-type, though he doesn't feature in the film anywhere near as much as I would've liked.

Overall I think there's too much action, too many characters (a lot of whom are barely developed), and the dinosaurs don't seem as real due to an increased reliance on CGI. It's a lot gorier than the first movie, and the whilst the rampaging T-rex ending is a lot of fun it's also morally unfair - we're expected to sympathise with the dinosaurs due to the fact that they're depicted as animals rather than monsters, and yet the T-rex is shown brutally eating innocent people back in LA! I guess it was always going to be hard to do a sequel to a film that had a heavy reliance on the audience being shown something they'd never seen before, and perhaps Spielberg was wise not to attempt a retread of this. There are some great set pieces to watch out for (the T-rexes attacking the caravan, and the Compsognathuses menacing and attacking Peter Stormare's character), but that's all they are: set pieces. Leftover sequences that could be shoehorned into any of the Jurassic Park films (this is a phenomenon that would continue into the third film as well), suggesting that a narratively-sound sequel might be a relative impossibility.

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by David Koepp, based on the novel by Michael Crichton.
KEY ACTORS: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Richard Attenborough, Vince Vaughn, Vanessa Lee Chester, Peter Stormare, Thomas F. Duffy

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel The Lost World by Michael Crichton, sequel to his original novel: Jurassic Park.
- This film is the sequel to the film Jurassic Park, and is followed by a third film, Jurassic Park III.
- For more rampaging dinosaurs, see Godzilla and The Valley of Gwangi.
- The title and concept of this film alludes to Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, The Lost World.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Visual Effects.