Due to the mega-success of JURASSIC PARK,
the pressure was on to do a sequel. Michael Crichton had to be
prodded into writing a followup to his novel, and yet scriptwriter
David Koepp used very little of Crichton's The Lost World
in his screenplay. Instead, he overloaded the story
with stereotypes (the guy from Greenpeace, the evil capitalist,
the big game hunter) and, for the most part, makes humans the
"monsters". The special effects are still top notch, but the
story is lame, the dinosaurs tame and the characters shallow.
In JAWS, we firmly
believed that Richard Dreyfus was a shark expert or that Robert Shaw
was a shark hunter, because we were provided with multiple pieces of
onscreen evidence. In THE LOST WORLD, we are told Julianne Moore
is a paleontologist and Vince Vaughn is a documentary producer and
activist, but the evidence we are given onscreen leads us to believe
they are both just actors playing poorly written parts. (Why the
hell would a paleontologist run into a herd of stegasauri instead of
away from them when she is under attack?). For the most part, you can
tell who is going to live and who will die by how close each
character's political and social attitudes are to Steven
Spielberg's. Therefore, the guy from Greenpeace makes it, the
evil capitalist dies, and so on. The setpieces are not nearly as
entertaining as those in the original film, and a climax in which a
T-Rex gets loose in San Diego only serves to remind us how KING KONG and GODZILLA
did this kind of stuff so much better. A real disappointment that
gets an extra half a star for the still-amazing special effects. ½ - JB
Steven Spielberg The Stuff You Gotta Watch Home Page
ADD ANOTHER QUOTE AND MAKE IT A GALLON
"Taking dinosaurs off this island is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas."