After the massive success of the first Jurassic Park, it seemed only natural that Universal would want to make a sequel almost immediately. For the sequel, Steven Spielberg returned to direct, David Koepp, who wrote the first film, came back to pen the sequel, John Williams came back to score the film, and this time, it was adapted from Michael Critchon’s follow-up to his original novel, 1995’s The Lost World. While the novel was not very well-received, it still was a success, spending eights weeks at the top of the New York Times Best-Seller list. Much like the book, the only main returning character from the first film is Ian Malcolm, once again played by Jeff Goldblum. Released four years after the original, The Lost World: Jurassic Park certainly had a lot to live up to, given how critically-acclaimed and financially successful the first movie was. Does this sequel live up to the first one, or does it fall short of its expectations? Well….it’s a bit of both. So, let’s get into it.
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Taking place four years after the events of the first film, we open on a family vacationing on Isla Sorna, an island off the coast of Costa Rica near the island from the previous film, Isla Nublar. The family’s daughter is attacked by small dinosaurs called compsognathuses, and they file a lawsuit against Hammond’s company InGen. As a result, Hammond’s nephew Peter Ludlow, played by Arliss Howard, now owns the company and plans to go to Isla Sorna with a team of mercenaries to capture the dinosaurs on the island and bring them back to San Diego to open a new park. So, Hammond asks Malcolm to go to the island to document the dinosaurs to try and get support to stop human interference on the island and turn it into a protected sanctuary for the dinosaurs. Initially refusing, Malcolm is convinced to go when he learns that his girlfriend, paleontologist Dr. Sarah Harding, played by Julianne Moore, is already on the island. After meeting with his team, including equipment specialist and engineer Eddie Carr, played by Richard Schiff, and videographer/activist Nick Van Owen, played by Vince Vaughn, Ian Malcolm sets off for the island to find his girlfriend and stop the mercenaries from exploiting the dinosaurs.
I’m not going to lie to you, dear reader. This movie isn’t very good. Honestly, this movie should be good. It’s following up on one of the best films of the 90s, it has the same director, the same writer, the same composer, the same effects guys, and Jeff Goldblum in the lead. It should work, but it just doesn’t. The movie is honestly really boring. Admittedly, the setup for it is decent, and it is nice to Hammond, Lex, and Tim again, even if it’s for a small cameo. Even though the reason for having Malcolm go back to the island is weak, and even he points out that much of this is a bad idea, Ian Malcolm was one of the best characters from the first film, and Goldblum is so watchable and charismatic that he can elevate anything he’s in. In addition, this movie does have a pretty decent supporting cast. In addition to Moore, who was also in Boogie Nights the same year, there’s also character actors like Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Stormare, Richard Schiff, Ian Abercrombie, and Arliss Howard. ILM returns to do the digital dinosaur effects, and Stan Winston and his crew return to design the practical dinosaur effects as well. There are also a few fun sequences in the movie, including one where Malcolm, Sarah, and Nick narrowly survive falling to their deaths in their lab/trailer, and especially in the last act when a T-Rex is let loose in San Diego and goes on a rampage. There are some good elements to the film…but there’s also quite a lot that doesn’t work.
While there are some pretty good actors in here, a lot of them are honestly wasted here. Goldblum kind of looks like he’s just going through the motions, Moore comes across as being a bit of an idiot, and Vaughn is honestly just there and doesn’t really do much. Probably the weakest for me was Vanessa Lee Chester as Kelly, Malcolm’s daughter, who solely exists just to get in danger all the time. She even has probably one of the dumbest moments in any movie ever where, after earlier establishing that she’s a gymnast, she uses her gymnastic abilities to kick a raptor through a wall. Watching the scene, I was laughing quite hard at just how ridiculous that was, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to or not. Also, while I criticized Nedry and Gennaro from the first film for being two-dimensional villains, they were at least memorable and they were only in about half of the movie. Here, the villains feel like they’re out of a Saturday morning cartoon. The Peter Ludlow character is basically an evil version of Hammond, where Hammond was at least kind, caring, and had good intentions, Ludlow is the cliche exploiting-mother-nature-for-profit villain we’ve seen time and time again. Like I mentioned earlier, there is quite a lot of spectacle in the movie, but the characters and plot are so poorly-written that you really just don’t care.
So yeah, it unfortunately didn’t live up to the expectations set by the first film. To be fair to the film, it would’ve been very difficult to make a worthy successor to the original Jurassic Park. As I stated in my review for that, it was one of those rare lightning-in-a-bottle movies that just can’t be replicated. Even with that said, in summation, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a very flawed sequel that has some good moments and a glimmer of what made the first movie work, but it ultimately lacks the charm and seems to forget that you need a great story and characters before you need dazzling special effects. Here’s hoping the next one is at least slightly better than this one.
