The Lost World is Missing
the Heart of Jurassic Park

I loved Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park as much as the rest of the world. It has made over $900 million world wide, and as the biggest money maker in history it was only natural they should make a sequel. With a built in audience begging for more dinosaurs it is as close to a sure thing as one can get in Hollywood.

In making The Lost World, however, Spielberg has lost the sense of wonder we found with the original. Rather than focusing on the majesty of the creatures on the island, he creates something akin to "Wild Kingdom" gone horribly wrong, and the audience is so busy worrying about who is going to get chomped next they forget about the miracle of seeing dinosaurs. The dinos, in fact, become just another movie monster like Godzilla or King Kong.

In the movie, Jeff Goldblum returns as Dr. Ian Malcolm, the chaos theorist from the first film who accurately predicted that humanity would lose their fight to control the dinos. This time Malcolm travels to Site B, an enigmatic research facility where the dinosaurs were originally bred and set loose into the wild. (The novel does a much better job of setting up the premise.)

Along the way we find big game hunters under the new ownership of John Hammond's (Sir Richard Attenborough) InGen corporation who have come to Site B to capture the dinosaurs for transportation to captivity. In a fit of moral outrage and environmental awareness, Malcolm's colleague and girlfriend Dr. Sarah Harding (played by Julianne Moore) sets the dinosaurs free and rescues a baby Tyrannosaurs Rex which has a broken leg. This is all in the early part of the film, and little is taken from the novel.

The story is loosely (and I mean very loosely) adapted from Michael Crichton's novel. Actually, the movie corrects some problems where the novel made the mistake of sticking two kids into the plot and mirroring Jurassic Park too closely. In fact, the movie does a sensational job of trying to be a different movie all together. The problem is, in trying to be different it becomes darker and looses the magic the original held. It also looses some of the best written scenes in the novel, reducing them to mere shadows.

But there are dinosaurs -- LOTS of dinosaurs -- and that makes this film worth viewing. The special effects are incredible, and the action is intense. I literally jumped in my seat several times, which is rare. There is quite a bit of death-by-dinosaur in this one, so I wouldn't recommend it for younger viewers.

MY RATING: 5 out of 10.

RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 134 min.