MY MOVIE SHELF: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

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!

MY MOVIE SHELF: Deep Impact

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: 296  Days to go: 283

Movie #81: Deep Impact

Back at the start of 1998 there was a lot of hubbub within insider entertainment news about two different “giant asteroid” movies being made (and set to release ) at the same time. Within two months of each other that summer, Deep Impact and Armageddon were released. Armageddon was by far the bigger movie — bigger stars, bigger budget, bigger hit, plus a theme song that railroaded just about everything in its path — but for me, Deep Impact has always been the better one.

Armageddon was always meant to be a flashy, wise-cracking dude movie with explosions, and that’s fine. Those are good, enjoyable popcorn flicks, and they don’t need a lot of substance to succeed. It’s a save-the-world movie, concerned only with those doing the saving. Deep Impact, on the other hand, is a movie about human frailty and heroism — it’s about the people on the ground faced with the hopes and fears of a global mission to divert an extinction-level event-sized asteroid, and the harsh realities that force them to face their own mortality and decide what’s important.

On the surface, one could probably pin Deep Impact‘s humanity on its director Mimi Leder (as opposed to Armageddon‘s testosterone-obsessed Michael Bay), a woman who throughout her career directing (largely) TV episodes has always shown interest in the personal stories associated with great drama. Even her other action thriller motion picture, The Peacemaker, had a villain with an emotional, personal purpose. What makes Deep Impact so exceptional, though, are the multiple stories it encompasses and the breadth of their emotions contained within.

Elijah Wood plays a young high school student named Leo Biederman who is thrust into the spotlight when the anomaly he spots during astronomy club turns out to be an asteroid larger than Mount Everest on a collision course with Earth. But he’s still just a kid, in love with his high school sweetheart Sarah (Leelee Sobieski), interested in sex and motorbikes, and close to his parents. In a quintessentially teenager way, he finds the notoriety kind of thrilling at first, and as the time to collision draws nearer, he fights to hold things together, and matures quite a bit, as he would have to.

Tea Leoni, meanwhile, is Jenny Lerner, an ambitious researcher at MSNBC who stumbles on the story of the asteroid when looking into the questionable resignation of a top government official. She bluffs her way through a confidential meeting with the President (Morgan Freeman) enough to find out the true story and get first question (a significant boost to her career) at the White House press briefing on the matter. Suddenly, she too is thrust into the spotlight, seen by the nation as the face of any news concerning the asteroid. It’s everything she’s wanted professionally, but personally she is suffering. Her father (Maximilian Schell) has left her mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and married a much younger woman — only two years older than Jenny herself. Any other time this state of affairs would be a tough hurdle, but faced with the possible end of all life on Earth, Jenny is at loose ends, unable to find any solid footing — particularly after the suicide of her mother. She shuns her father in anger, but gives up her ride to safety at the zero hour to a colleague she’s always admired (Laura Innes) who has a young daughter, and seeks out her father to reconcile with him. That’s where she needs to be, because her family is what’s most important to her.

The astronauts sent into space to destroy the asteroid are also featured, but as fully realized people with strengths and weaknesses instead of as wacky balls of machismo. These astronauts feature a woman, for one, played by Mary McCormack, who joins Blair Underwood, Ron Eldard, Jon Favreau, Aleksandr Baluev and Robert Duvall on a mission of arrogance, humility, loss, solidarity and ultimately sacrifice. Their mission, above all, is to save mankind if they can, regardless of the cost, and they fulfill it with heartbreaking and heroic resolve.

The movie also has small moments of lovely character work: Leo’s dad (Richard Schiff) giving him items to trade (and hence his blessing) when Leo decides to go back for Sarah. The President facing the nation with calm leadership, pragmatism, hope and eventually heartfelt compassion. The meticulous beauty regimen of Jenny’s mom and the devastating realization that she’s preparing to take her own life. The wrenching goodbyes between Sarah and her parents as they hand over her baby brother to care for and send her off with Leo to survive without them, then their touching embrace as they await their ends.

Deep Impact is great. It’s a movie filled with touching and thoughtful moments, of the wide array of feelings and fears that would be an absolute certainty in the face of such an impending event. It’s a movie that is concerned with the human condition, without sacrificing action and suspense. It explores the realistic, years-long process between discovery and destruction of such an asteroid, and how life continues to go on all that time, despite the looming possibility of the end of the world. It’s an emotional, touching, heartbreaking film. So I guess it’s no surprise that Deep Impact, unlike Armageddon, always leaves me in tears.