THE LOST WORLD Can’t Capture The Magic of JURASSIC PARK
The JURASSIC PARK franchise is one of the more vexing modern movie series I can think of.
Assuming we’re only focusing on the motion pictures, and ignoring the bevy of animated series associated with everyone’s favorite dinosaur theme park, the JURASSIC PARK franchise is now seven movies deep, with no less than three distinct sets of casts and characters. They just keep cranking them out, and have been since the mid-90’s. The odd part is, the movies just keep making billions of dollars, even as you look around and realize…nobody really likes the JURASSIC PARK sequels that much?
I mean, yes, the first JURASSIC WORLD seemed to have a brief foothold in pop culture, and did as much to confirm the idea of Chris Pratt* as a 2010s action star as GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY did to introduce it. I’ve always had a soft spot for that one, not so much for any of its plot turns or character dynamics (all of which felt rote and by-the-book), but for its honest depiction of Jurassic World as a genuine theme park, complete with its own CityWalk and celebrity tie-ins. A lot of people rolled their eyes at the prominence of a Margaritaville and a pre-ride video starring Jimmy Fallon in it, but to be frank, all of that was the most believable world-building I’d seen in a long time.
*Yes, there really was a time when Chris Pratt was more or less universally beloved.
As time went on, though, JURASSIC WORLD started gaining an admittedly earned reputation for being cynical, mean, and nostalgia-baity (it all climaxes with the T-Rex from the first movie making a big superhero entrance, which is a really weird thing to do if you think about it). The other two JURASSIC WORLDs never even curried that much favor in the first place; FALLEN KINGDOM largely eschewed islands and parks and mostly took place in an old mansion, while DOMINION remains one of the most baffling blockbusters I’ve ever seen, with two generations of JURASSIC actors mostly just standing around staring at locusts, looking embarrassed to be there. The less said about the most recent offering, JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH the better.
Of course, strange and slightly sad JURASSIC PARK sequels are not a modern plague. In 2001, Sam Neill returned for JURASSIC PARK III, a Joe Johnston romp that actually gets off to an okay start, with a “family tries to recover their son from the dormant island” plot line. It even has some goofy energy to it; Honest Trailers and Reddit have made much mirth out of the raptor saying “Alan!” to Dr. Grant, but everyone seems to have forgotten the context (for the record, it’s a dream sequence; there isn’t actually a dinosaur that speaks English in JURASSIC PARK III).
The movie’s main issue is that, after a fairly okay first and second act, it just…kinda stops dead in its tracks. Seriously, put JURASSIC PARK III on again sometime. The climactic battle starts to gear up, then the army just shows up and the movie is over. It’s one of the most abrupt endings I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood production, a sure sign that the whole thing just couldn’t come together behind the scenes. Plus, JURASSIC PARK III runs into the same issue future sequels would; how do you do this without Steven Spielberg? Hell, even Spielberg himself couldn’t capture the magic a second time.
This brings us to the awkwardly titled THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, which served as both Spielberg’s return to the world of dinosaurs, as well as the silver screen itself. It had been four years since his Oscars night triumph, and in the interim, he went ahead and founded a whole movie studio.
So, was the wait worth it? Upon review…maybe? Kind of? Not really?
THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, Pete Postlethwaite, Vanessa Chester, Peter Stormare
Written by: David Koepp
Released: May 23, 1997
Length: 129 minutes
In this go-around, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) reluctantly returns to the world of Jurassic Park when John Hammond recruits him on a rescue mission. The location? A previously-undisclosed second island, where the dinosaurs were originally cloned and left to mingle until they got (hypothetically) transported to the park. The target? Ian’s girlfriend, Dr. Sarah Harding (Moore). Joining him on this mission is documentarian Nick Van Owen (Vaughn), engineer Eddie Carr, and (stowing away) Ian’s estranged daughter Kelly (Chester). Place all of these folks, as well as a team of big-game hunters led by the amazingly named Roland Tembo (Postlethwaite), onto a dinosaur-infested island and what do you get? Well, if you’re Universal, you’re hoping for a shit-ton of money and merchandise.
THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK was not a sequel that was ever supposed to be; the ending of the first film felt fairly definitive, with everyone realizing the idea of a theme park with real dinosaurs is a terrible idea and leaving it all behind. Yet, the success of the initial 1990 Michael Crichton novel, as well as that of Spielberg’s 1993 film adaptation, made a second JURASSIC PARK adventure all but inevitable. As Crichton got to work on a second novel, which would go on to be titled THE LOST WORLD, the only real question was who would end up directing the movie.
For a long time, Spielberg wasn’t going to do it. He actually hadn’t made a film in a couple of years, instead making himself busy launching DreamWorks Studios with his colleagues Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. He genuinely wasn’t sure if his life could accommodate doing this film. At one point, Joe Johnston had made himself available for the director’s chair, and he would eventually helm JURASSIC PARK III, but at a certain point, the pressure became too much for him to ignore. By 1995, Spielberg had officially returned and they were off to the races.
Whether or not he should have returned is somewhat of a touchy subject. For Spielberg, he’s gone on record as kind of regretting it. He would go on to say in a 2016 interview with the New York Times:
My sequels aren’t as good as my originals because I go onto every sequel I’ve made and I’m too confident [...] This movie made a ka-zillion dollars, which justifies the sequel, so I come in like it’s going to be a slam dunk and I wind up making an inferior movie to the one before. I’m talking about The Lost World and Jurassic Park”.
I will say I think he’s not giving quite enough implied credit to INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, but…it’s hard not to blame him for calling out THE LOST WORLD. I don’t really think it’s a bad movie; it has its fun charms, and the idea of seeing realistic dinosaurs onscreen still has a bit of novelty. But it’s hard to shake the feeling of malaise hanging over the entire picture.
The biggest change from JURASSIC PARK 1 to JURASSIC PARK 2 is the cast. Although a few cast members from the first one make brief appearances, including the aforementioned John Hammond, as well as his now-grown grandchildren. But as far as the main ensemble goes, the sole returning link between the first two installments is Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm. And, look, he has a ton of great stuff in this. He isn’t quite in his “buying into his own shit” era, so the quirky, stammering line reads still feel somewhat natural, as opposed to nowadays where he often feels like he’s playing a Jeff Goldblum walk-around character at Disneyland. My favorite moment of his in THE LOST WORLD is probably his reaction to someone in the initial search party yelling out Sarah’s full name (“How…many Sarahs do you think there are on this island?”).
The problem there, though, is that upgrading Ian Malcolm from a memorable ensemble piece to the lead is that the increased screen time saps what makes him stand out in the first place. In JURASSIC PARK, he’s the bad boy genius, the man who recognizes the chaos inherent to the premise for what it is. He doesn’t have an arc, per se, but he so joyously helps facilitate the themes of the plot. In THE LOST WORLD, he must now have a journey, complete with an estranged girlfriend and child that he has to figure out how to reconnect with. It’s all classically Spielbergian, but it makes Malcolm feel like a completely different guy. Because of that, what’s the point?
The other issue is that, well…the rest of the cast just isn’t all that compelling. Again, I like Posthlewaite’s alpha male hunter guy, it’s interesting seeing a young Vince Vaughn basically play it straight, and Arliss Howard is effectively slimy as Hammond’s nephew, a company man with sinister plans for the dinosaurs on this abandoned island. But Julianne Moore, as game as she is to throw herself into the action sequences, and as good as she is at expressing wide-eyed wonder and joy at the existence of dinosaurs, doesn’t really have a character to play here. As for Vanessa Chester, since she gives a fairly limp and precocious child performance, I think she became an easy target for the ire of those who didn’t like this movie. I don’t really think that that’s fair, but it does feel fairly obvious that Kelly is a real missed opportunity of a character*.
(The good news is that Vanessa has since grown into a fairly prolific actor, and an elite Doughboys guest!)
*And, yes, before you bring up the “gymnastics” action scene, where Kelly is able to swing on the pipes of a warehouse to such a degree that she kicks a raptor out a window, I agree that it’s silly. But given the goofy bullshit that goes on in the next five movies, this practically seems like a grounded, Bresson-esque construct in retrospect.
As for the regretful guy in the director’s chair, the good news is that pedestrian Spielberg work is still okay. One of the best things to recommend about THE LOST WORLD is that its action sequences all feel unique and distinct from the first movie. The scene with the raptors taking people out in the tall grass in particular has such a simple visual horror to it that it makes you wonder why they didn’t do it in the first movie. The final act with a T-Rex running roughshod in downtown San Diego feels tacked on, but it also kind of saves THE LOST WORLD entirely, a perfect escalation of the initial concept; instead of people coming to a dinosaur island, what if dinosaur left the island to come to the people?
Because the big old question surrounding this movie, and all others that come after it, is why the fuck anybody would ever go back to the big scary dinosaur island? The impetus in this one isn’t all that great, in my opinion, and feels extremely “sequel-y”. I don’t love the idea of there being this secret second island that nobody ever knew about, if only because it feels like someone’s first idea in THE LOST WORLD’s “blue-sky” session, and it just stuck. And Dr. Malcolm being motivated to rescue Sarah, a character we’ve never heard of before and, in fact, don’t even yet know the face of, and who turns out to not even be in danger…it’s dramatically impotent. Neither David Koepp’s script or Spielberg’s direction are able to wring much emotion out of this premise.
It all speaks to the inherent contradiction of successful filmmaking. You take a compelling premise, assemble a top-notch director, screenwriter, cast and visual team, and through the power of alchemy and luck, you end up with a zeitgeist-y hit like JURASSIC PARK, the kind of movie that most creatives go their entire careers unable to make, the kind of situation that is almost impossible to recreate. And then it makes a shit-ton of money because it’s so good, and everyone spends the rest of their lives trying to recreate it.
So, no, it turns out, you can’t just take one cast member from JURASSIC PARK, fill in the other slots with other equivalents and hope for the best. JURASSIC PARK III tried the same playbook a few years later, to similar results. Maybe this is why JURASSIC WORLD fared a bit better in this regard; the character types were different. But…look, people love that first movie so much that generations of people are willing to keep letting Hollywood try. Maybe eighth time’s the charm? But THE LOST WORLD should have probably been a signal to leave well enough alone.
All that said.
Despite all of these flaws, and with full recognition that those flaws run deep enough to keep the movie from being a misunderstood classic or something like that, I do have to say that THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK will still always have a special place in my heart.
This is because it’s the earliest moment I can think of where I sat in a theater and started putting together how movies actually worked. I first saw it when I was nine, which means it was, um, a long time ago now. Yet I still remember the specific scene.
It’s the scene where our characters are all huddled behind a waterfall, being pursued by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. As the Rex sticks its snout through the water, one of the hunter characters finds a snake on his shoulder, freaks out, and winds up as T-Rex food. It’s a moment of high drama. The John Williams score is blaring, there’s blood going through the water and everything. Cool shit.
For a moment, everything’s calm. Then, more commotion around the waterfall. “It’s coming back!” someone else. Thank god, though, it’s not the T-Rex, it’s Dr. Ian Malcolm himself, who had previously separated from the group. Big relief from the audience. Everything’s going to be okay!
Except, I already knew everything was going to be okay. I knew not to be scared. Because, right before Goldblum stuck his face through the water, I realized “oh, the music isn’t playing! Something’s up!” I managed to make the connection of “score in scary scene = dinosaur, no score = fakeout”. I wasn’t trying to be smarter than everybody else, nor was I trying to “beat” the movie. Nine-year-old me just made a connection he hadn’t before.
Then I noticed how the room full of adults were still swept away, terrified of the peril being wrought on our human characters. The calculation behind the movie, which was obvious enough to a child, was still able to enchant a theater full of strangers. It wasn’t even that good of a movie. Yet it still got an emotional reaction out of everyone.
I thought that was cool.
So, even though JURASSIC PARK absolutely never needed a sequel, let alone six, I’m glad they made one, if only for that memory. And, hell, what do I know, maybe JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM or REBIRTH or whatever had the same effect on some other nine year old. So, who am I to say these movies are bad? That’s the power of movies.