The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 216 Days to go: 218
Movie #161: The Lost World: Jurassic Park
I actually always thought the name of this movie was Jurassic Park: The Lost World, not the other way around, so this kind of screws with my alphabetization but I absolve it since I bought them in a packaged set. I have very particular rules for these types of things, which honestly probably makes it fortunate I’ve never worked in a library.
The Lost World picks up a few years after Jurassic Park, when our intrepid chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) finds out Hammond (Richard Attenborough) still hasn’t learned his lesson and instead of napalming the whole Jurassic Park site and experiment, has instead allowed an heretofore unknown Site B of free-roaming dinosaurs flourish on a nearby island from the original park. What could go wrong?
Malcolm is immediately in a frenzy over the idea of this, much less Hammond’s plan to send an observation team to the site. Naturally, though, Hammond has once again ignored the voice of reason and already has a team made up of Eddie Carr (beardless Richard Schiff) and Nick Van Owen (a regrettably macho Vince Vaughn — tough guy is not his forte) prepping for departure as well as Ian’s own girlfriend, paleontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) already on site. This freaks Ian right the hell out and is the only way Hammond gets him to go on this crazy adventure, but of course there has to be a kid involved, which is how Ian’s daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) winds up stowing away in the communications trailer.
Once again, the scientists are initially interested solely in the academic aspects of observing and analyzing the dinosaurs in their natural habitat, but when Hammond’s son-in-law brings a second team to trap and transport the animals back to civilization, things go haywire once again.
Lots of people don’t really like the Jurassic Park sequels, but I do. Instead of being simply a carbon copy of the original, The Lost World hits similar notes on the island to its predecessor, but then ups the ante by bringing a T-Rex and its young to mainland San Diego, where the elder beast wreaks havoc on American soil, when it becomes up to Ian and Sarah to lure and trap the animal on a barge set for transport back to the island. (Still not sure why nobody bombs the hell out of said island, but what do I know.)
A T-Rex loose in San Diego might be a pretty effective plot twist (complete with dog house hanging from its mouth), but don’t discount the island terror either. First there’s the arrogant hubris of big game hunter Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite) intent on capturing a tyrannosaur as has prize. He captures a baby to lure the parent into his trap, but when Sarah finds it and takes it back to set its broken leg, the T-Rexes track down and attack their camp. The entire sequence of the slowly cracking glass underneath Sarah’s weight is thrilling and awful to witness, but at least the high-hide being at perfect biting height doesn’t lead Kelly to her doom. Next there’s the little lizard dinosaurs attacking that d-bag Dieter (Peter Stormare) en masse, for which we get just a trickle of blood joining the flow of the stream to let us know his fate. This is nothing to the rapid attack of the raptors through the high grass, though, which surpasses even Kelly’s acrobatic gymnastic defeat of them later on. With no evidence of their presence but a ripple through the grasses as seen only from above, they pull their prey (the fleeing members of Injen’s second team) down with a vicious flash. It’s visually striking and so, so scary.
Hubris, naturally, is never rewarded in these films, as Arliss Howard (Peter Ludlow) gets to be carnivore training for little baby T-Rex. Your arrogance will be punished in the most brutal and karma-appropriate way, sir. Count on it.
Honestly, I don’t buy the relationships in The Lost World of Ian and Sarah, or Ian and Kelly, or Sarah and Kelly for that matter. And, as noted, Vince Vaughn will never make a reliable tough guy. So in that sense, the film falls decidedly short of Jurassic Park, yet on a purely action-adventure level, I think it succeeds just fine. The only place it perhaps fails (aside from the positively robotic and forced cameo performances of Hammond’s grandchildren) is in doing more world-building in a world that was already sufficiently built in the first film. Regardless of the fact that it deals with a second site, I think perhaps the film takes a little too much time getting us to the island this time. Thankfully, that won’t be quite as much of a problem the next time around. (Spoiler.) Stay tuned!
Viable Option 