Twenty-five years ago this week, I had a very specific, very disappointing thought: I can't believe he didn't use the music more. Steven Spielberg's movie missed the mark in a number of ways. The criminal underuse of John Williams was the biggest one for me. The Lost World:Jurassic Park was released in 1997 and received a lot of hype. Audiences were impressed by one of the best films ever made a few years ago. The sequel was finally here. What could happen next? Is it possible that Spielberg could duplicate that magic? He tries, but fails. io9's Jurassic Rewatch is here. I'm going through each film in the franchise in the lead-up to the June 10 release of the movie. We're at The Lost World, which is the first place we've been. It's a film that I will almost always watch when it's on because it has a lot of energy. I get the sense that it has to be better than I remember. I must have missed something. Right? Wrong. Things start to look promising. We meet Ian Malcolm again after an intriguing prologue where a little girl is eaten by dinosaurs. He was summoned by the founder of the park for a proposition. He created two islands, one of which was the recreated version ofJurassic Park. Over the past few years, the dinosaurs have been living at the second site, called Site B, which was where they grew up before coming to the park. Most of the characters who survived didn't speak out about the incident due to non-disclosure agreements. In the first few minutes, Tim and Lex make an incredibly brief appearance, never to return. Malcolm was ostracized for breaking the contract and speaking out against the dangers of the park. Next-Level Sound can be experienced. Theater-like sound surrounds you with spatial audio with dynamic head tracking.
Those are at least somewhat interesting. Does the public believe what happened on the island? What do the other characters think about being silenced? That doesn't come into play. Instead, Malcolm is persuaded to go to Site B with a small group of professionals, who are also his girlfriend, to document the dinosaurs and prove to the world they do exist. The group is racing against the InGen corporation, run by Arliss Howard, who wants to bring the dinosaurs back to the United States and open a park there.
Again, not the greatest idea, but not a bad one either. Corporate greed and environmental conservativism are two different things. The public knows the truth about this mystery. The Lost World isn't really about that either. Malcolm and his group's focus is pulled when his daughter is introduced, and then a whole parenting subplot unfolds. Pete Postlethwaite is the professional hunter/tracker in InGen, and he becomes heroic. Peter Stormare plays a character that we barely care about in a full scene. The dueling ideologies go away as the two parties are forced to team up to escape the island after a series of dinosaur attacks.
Being unfocused and confusing is the biggest sin committed by The Lost World. Not that it's hard to follow, but there's so much going on that you don't know what to think. Who are we supposed to support? The film is trying to say something. Is it trying to say too many things? The film ends up giving up. At the end of act two, Vince Vaughn's character, who is supposed to be a hero and symbol of the pro-environment argument, disappears. Malcolm's daughter returns in a brief scene at the end. There is no sense of doom or purpose in the big finale between the humans and the Velociraptors. There is no real impact without a sense of accomplishment or closure.
There are dinosaurs. You are in awe but scared of them in the first park. It is kind of both and neither in The Lost World. We're supposed to sympathize with the animals. We are meant to be terrified in the next. There is no clear point of view on the subject. The T-Rexs are an issue in the film. There are two adult T-Rexs and they have a baby. The T-Rexs attack when humans kidnap the child. You are meant to be scared for the humans, but you also side with the T-Rex. You don't abduct someone's child. The grey area of morality makes the set piece with two T-Rexs less exciting than it should be.
There is a dash of genuine excitement at the end of the film. After a few people survive against all the dinosaurs, the InGen team captures an adult T-Rex and takes it back to America. The dinosaurs are out, that's the moment both films have been leading up to. It is the most rousing, propulsive scene in the film. It doesn't make sense on the other side. We are supposed to believe that a T-Rex kills everyone on this boat. How did it get around the boat? There were other dinosaurs on the plane. Where are they? We don't know. The boat smashes into the dock in San Diego because all the humans are dead.
The T-Rex is able to escape and hit the town, which results in a picture of a dinosaur walking down the street, drinking out of swimming pools, and smashing up gas stations. By this point, they are all pleasing images. The whole scene is supposed to be InGen's comeuppance for lying to the public, but that doesn't really happen. The T-Rex goes back to the island and the movie ends on a positive note.
The Lost World is up to the title. It's lost. Steven Spielberg knows how to shoot and edit compelling scenes, which makes the final product a complete mess. Those scenes don't add up to much. Even though this is based on another Michael Crichton book, no one was sure how to follow up the success of Jurassic Park. All of the ideas were put into a blender. We are left with an overly dense, unclear hodgepodge of a movie that has a few solid moments but more often than not, works against everything that made Jurassic Park good.
I realized that The Lost World only uses John Williams themes a few times before the end credits. The film's emotional content never matches those notes. The movie isn't strong enough to use that music.
The movie that will come up next is 2001'sJurassic Park III, which is 92 minutes. That can be bad.
1. There is a movie called "Jurassic Park."
2. The Lost World is a movie.
3-6. It's too early to say.
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