Review: The Lost World Is A Painful Disappointment
- Jun 15, 2018
- 2 min read
As a film, Jurassic Park set up several sequel opportunities. This wasn't one of them.
Four years have passed since the events of Jurassic Park when John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) reveals to Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) that the island with which he became a little too familiar was one of two. Site B, the location where the dinosaurs were grown and tested, has fallen into disrepair and, in line with Malcolm's theories, has become its own prehistoric ecosystem. Hammond recruits Malcolm, along with palaeontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) , to document this new, lost world.
The Lost World is a film that had potential. The dinosaur-human interactions of what is now a 25 year old franchise will never cease to be enjoyable, and this film features some of the franchises best, but while Spielberg's first time around gave us intelligent, capable character who found themselves unwillingly thrust into a terrible situation, The Lost World lacks that, and it shows. Ian Malcolm, a character whose sole motivation is to prove that dinosaurs are dangerous, science is fallible and sometimes we should leave well enough alone, is the last person who would want to return to a dinosaur infested island. And yet here he is, stuttering and stammering his way through analogies of how things will inevitably go wrong, despite happily going along for the ride, Then there's his daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), a character so utterly infuriating and totally pointless that people in the film itself wish she wasn't there.
There is but one exception to the rule however, coming in the form of Pete Postlethwaite's Roland Tembo. He's a big game hunter, much like Robert Muldoon, who's leading a party intent on capturing the dinosaurs. Tembo is cool and calculating, a neither villainous nor heroic. He's come to find his next prize, a tyrannosaur. While he never does much, it's quite clear that all the films writing talent was poured into a single character, one who is brought to life by Postlethwaite, and lends the piece some much needed credibility.
Once again however, the dinosaurs are the real stars here. However weak the script, stupid the characters or pointless the film, watching as a family of angry tyrannosaurs quite literally tear apart the cast will never grow old, nor will raptors hunting hapless fodder in long grass. If there's one thing that The Lost World does better than its predecessor, it's the body count. It also ups the horror aspect with a couple of sequences that are arguably better than any on display in Jurassic Park. Seriously, you'll never look at an overgrown field the same way again.
The Lost World could have been a film on par with the first. It could have. Unfortunately it isn't. Poorly written characters, a stupid plot and a third act that's not worth mentioning leave it being a painfully average movie with a handful of tantalisingly excellent scenes.
Comments