Jurassic Park Retrospective Pt. 3: The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Yeah, “oooh,” “aaah.” That’s how it starts. Then there’s running and screaming- Dr. Ian Malcolm
Much like the previous film, The Lost World adaptation began production even before Crichton’s novel version was complete. Crichton, busy as he was writing the aforesaid novel, did not contribute to the screenplay this time, leaving David Koepp to write it all on his own. This is almost certainly the reason why The Lost World, contrary to its predecessor, is pretty much an in-name-only adaptation, cutting out half of the novel’s characters and most of the Crichton-original plot points (the only exceptions being the premise of a rescue operation centering on Site B on Isla Sorna and the famous T. rex attack on the two-part trailer). In fact, Spielberg incorporated several plot points from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, or more accurately, its 1925 film adaptation, most notably the climactic T. rex rampage in San Diego, which echoes the Brontosaurus rampage through London at the end of the Doyle adaptation.
Filming started in September 1996 with on-location shoots in Humboldt County, California, then continued on the Universal Studios sound stages throughout the following fall. The final scene to be filmed was the opening scene with the Compognathus attack, filmed on Kaua’i in the Hawaiian Islands in late December.
The film premiered on May 19, 1997, at the Cineplex Odeon in Universal City, Los Angeles, and was released nationwide on May 23 (my second birthday!). Like its predecessor, the film broke several box office records, ultimately grossing $618.6 million against a $73 million budget. On the other hand, the film’s critical and audience reception was decidedly mixed. While the advances in the special effects department were near universally praised, many felt that the characters and story were a downgrade from the original. Even Spielberg himself became disillusioned with it, claiming that:
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.
-Dargis, Manohla (May 15, 2016). "A Word With: Steven Spielberg". The New York Times. New York City.
But were the critics (and Spielberg) too harsh on the film? Does The Lost World offer more than what the initial critical reception let on? I know I can’t answer that question for everyone, but let me give my two cents on several aspects of the film, starting with:
Technical Aspects & Music
I think I can let the animatronics speak for themselves.
Mommy’s very angry- Dr. Ian Malcolm
The same special effects team returned from the first movie, including Stan Winston and Dennis Muren, and they’ve only gotten better since the last film. The animatronics are more detailed, with much more fine-tuned motions that allow them to tear apart cars and lift stunt actors by the leg or arm with their mouths without hurting the actors. The animatronic work in the science where the Rexes attack Eddie’s jeep is a particular standout, as everything between the Rexes emerging menacingly from the trees behind him to tossing the helpless man between their jaws was done with animatronics.
The CGI isn’t far behind, with the roundup scene, in particular, being praised for having much more believable broad daylight textures for the dinos than in the first film.
An extinct animal brought back to life has no rights. It exists because we made it. We patented it. We own it- Peter Ludlow
Of course, the clifftop scene, the obligatory Velociraptor action scene, and the San Diego rampage are equally impressive standouts, as is the Pteranodon that closes out the film (especially the way the sunlight shines through its wings).
John Williams returns to once again provide the score for this prehistoric adventure. While the themes may not quite have reached the same level of fame as the ones he composed for the first film, they’re still memorable in their own right, mainly thanks to the extensive use of conga drums, which help give this score its own identity.
If there is one aspect of the technical side of this movie that I have to criticize, it’s the film’s choice of shooting locations. I don’t feel that the temperate forest environment of Humboldt County is a good representation of what a tropical island like Isla Sorna would look like in real life. Spielberg and company justified it on the grounds that the redwood forests were a closer fit to the kinds of environment these dinosaurs would have occupied when they were still alive. Still, though, we’re talking about modern-day Earth, so it’s not exactly consistent.
The Script
The basic story in this version is that four years have passed since the events of the first film. John Hammond has lost control of a financially struggling InGen to his much more unscrupulous nephew, Peter Ludlow, who intends to smuggle the dinosaurs off Isla Sorna, where research and development on the prehistoric beasts took place, and bring them to a new version of Jurassic Park in San Diego. Hammond, who wishes the animals to be left in peace, sends his own expedition to the island to document them, including Dr. Ian Malcolm, who refuses at first until he learns that his girlfriend, paleontologist Sarah Harding, is already there. His efforts to convince her to leave are rendered fruitless when a series of dinosaur rampages destroys his party’s communications and those of Ludlow’s party, forcing the rivals to work together to escape. But their troubles don’t end when they do escape because Ludlow’s party has managed to tranquilize a fully grown T. rex, which is on its way to San Diego…
Several critics have lambasted this film’s story for emphasizing action and scares over meaningful dialogue and the sense of wonder the first film had. Indeed, The Lost World is quite a bit darker than the previous film, sporting the highest body count of the original trilogy and featuring some of its most disturbing kills (Eddie Carr getting ripped in half, Dieter Stark’s demise at the claws of the compies, Carter getting stomped under the buck Rex’s foot, Burke painting a waterfall red when he stumbles into a Rex’s jaws, Ludlow being used as hunting practice for the baby Rex, etc.).
On the other hand, it also features some abundant comic relief, mainly thanks to Ian Malcolm’s promotion to main protagonist, where a returning Jeff Goldblum portrays Malcolm as much more bitter and cynical, with the events of the first film having mostly cured him of what Hammond referred to as his “deplorable excess of personality.”
OK, so there is another island of dinosaurs, no fences this time, and you want to send people in, very few people, on the ground? Right? And who are these four lunatics that you're-you're trying to con into this?
Aside from Malcolm’s snark, other comedic highlights include Roland Trembo’s struggles to pronounce the dinosaurs’ names during the game trail roundup, a Pachycephalosaurus ramming an InGen jeep right as Burke is explaining their thick skull anatomy, the misunderstanding between Nick and Sarah when she tells him to spit in his hand to create an adhesive for the baby Rex’s leg (“Your gum!”), Ian’s battle of wits with a Velociraptor in the worker village (which almost plays out like a Looney Tunes slapstick gag with the amount of windows being broken) and the T. rex’s interactions with a suburban family and their dog during the San Diego rampage.
Much has been made about certain “plot holes” in the film, most notably what happened to the crew of the Venture, the ship that brought the buck Rex to the mainland. Many people argue that the buck Rex couldn’t have killed them because he was locked up in the cargo hold when the ship made landfall. Plus, the wheelhouse showed no signs of damage despite the helmsman’s severed hand still being attached to the wheel. As such, it’s not uncommon for people to speculate that a Velociraptor may have gotten on board, killed most of the crew, saw the sole survivor trying to abandon ship, and capsized the lifeboat trying to get him, drowning them both.
Remember, though, we never get a good look at the other side of the wheelhouse, which could have hidden the damage from a 13-meter reptile smashing its head in to get a quick meal. Indeed, we learn later that the buck was starting to go into cardiac arrest from the tranquilizers Roland Tembo injected it with, which led the Rex’s handlers to, in turn, accidentally give it a much too high dose of amphetamines to compensate (yes, you heard right: The T. Rex rampaging its way through San Diego was high on meth the whole time!). This caused the poor dinosaur to go on a killing frenzy until the final two survivors led it back into the hold, and the last surviving crew member used his final breath to press the button to close the hatch, hoping the hydraulics could keep the beast contained. Sadly, it didn’t work.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t certain aspects of the film that don’t make sense (how did Tembo know that there was another group on the island after the InGen camp was sabotaged instead of there possibly being a saboteur in his camp?). However, it’s safe to say that the Venture’s Mary Celeste act isn’t one of them.
The Characters
Most critics had problems with how several characters were portrayed in the film, especially the so-called “good guys” on Malcolm’s team. The team consists of Ian Malcolm (played once again by Jeff Goldblum), field equipment expert Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), video photojournalist and environmental activist Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughan), behavioral paleontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), and Malcolm’s stowaway daughter Kelly Curtis (Vanessa Lee Chester).
Harding earned a lot of ire from fans for being remarkably incompetent at actually being an animal behavior expert. Between petting a baby Stegosaurus and almost getting impaled on the mother’s thagomizer and walking around with her vest covered in the baby Rex’s blood, despite knowing that the parents have a keen sense of smell (indeed, she doesn’t realize this until the doe Rex has practically shoved her nose into her and Kelly’s tent), and constantly ignoring Malcolm’s warnings despite him having previous experience with these animals, it’s no wonder a lot of fans have come to hate her. She does get some redeeming moments later on (helping Nick heal the baby Rex, liberating it from the San Diego park, leading the buck Rex back to the Venture alongside Malcolm, and tranquilizing him so he can return to Isla Sorna in peace once Malcolm gets him back into the cargo hold). However, it doesn’t entirely compensate for her stupidity during the previous two acts.
Then there’s Nick, who manages to one-up Sarah in his unlikeability by indirectly causing several deaths among both groups in his environmentalist zeal. First, he unleashes the dinosaurs InGen captured during the game trail roundup, destroying that group’s communication equipment. Then, he takes the infant T. rex to the double trailer to tend to its wounds, thus leading to the destruction of the trailer (and, by extension, his group’s communication equipment) and Eddie’s death. Finally, he steals the bullets out of Tembo’s elephant gun, which forces the hunter to tranquilize the buck Rex instead, thus leading to the San Diego rampage.
However, Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard) is just as responsible for the San Diego incident because he did not simply cut his losses and leave the poor Rex in peace. If one takes the film’s deleted scenes as canon, then he is also responsible for the adult Rexes’ first rampage when he drunkenly tripped over Baby Rex and broke its leg. Indeed, I feel that how much you hate Nick really depends on how sympathetic you are to InGen’s goals, which I most certainly am not (especially Ludlow’s idea of setting up a new Jurassic Park on the mainland. At least Jurassic World had the decency to reestablish itself on Nublar). Indeed, Nick’s ideas of strategic sabotage are getting a lot more appealing in this day and age as human-caused climate change gets worse and worse and Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline starts getting more and more popular.
As for the other members of Malcolm’s team, Eddie is the only one who is universally liked due to his calm and rational demeanor and for sacrificing himself to the T. rexes while trying to save his friends from falling off a cliff. Kelly, meanwhile, has somewhat of a mixed reception due to not really doing much of anything to help with the situation aside from during the raptor attack when she puts her gymnastics skills to use and kicks one out a wall, where is gets impaled on a piece of debris and dies. While that scene has been criticized for being a little too ridiculous, even for a movie like this, you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty entertaining to watch.
Still, though, I think both detractors and apologists can all agree on one thing: Roland Tembo is the GOAT.
Somewhere on this island is the greatest predator there ever lived. The second greatest predator must take him down.- Roland Tembo
Not only is Tembo played with charisma by the late great Pete Postlethwaite, but he’s also the most competent and rational of all the characters in the film. His ultimate goal of hunting a T. rex (to the point that he forgoes payment from Ludlow in favor of it) is incredible in its own right. It gets even better when, after Nick steals his bullets, he still faces the buck head-on and pumps two tranquilizer darts into it without flinching. The scenes where he tells Ludlow off are also fun to watch, especially his introduction, where he chastises the hubristic executive for trying to set up a base camp on a game trail where predators could easily stumble across it, and his final line where, after losing his best friend and assistant Ajay (Harvey Jason) to the Velociraptors, he rebuffs Ludlow’s offer to work for him at Jurassic Park San Diego, he responds, “No, thank you. I believe I’ve spent enough time in the company of death.” Sadly, his biggest moment of awesome, where he beats up several bar patrons for harassing a waitress, ended up being cut when Spielberg became worried that it would make him too likable. He does lose a few points for being willing to use the injured baby Rex as bait rather than help it, but he’s certainly not unscrupulous.
Here are a few notes on some other characters before I wrap this up:
-Hammond (played by a returning Richard Attenborough) shows a bit of a devious side in his scene with Malcolm, as not only does he basically blackmail Malcolm into joining the expedition by revealing that his girlfriend is on the island, but he is also willing to bankrupt his own corporation and likely put thousands out of work to ease his own conscience over the destruction his creations caused. Indeed, one could even argue that his conversion to environmentalism is an insincere deathbed confession, a sentiment Malcolm seems to agree with (“So you went from capitalist to naturalist in just four years. That’s something.”). His selling Isla Nublar out to Masrani Corp. and thus setting up the events of Jurassic World is only further evidence of this.
-There’s not that much to Dieter Stark (Peter Stormare). He’s just the InGen group’s token evil teammate who antagonizes the compies by tasing one of them and gets killed for it in a way that’s both comedically satisfying and skin-crawlingly terrifying.
-Finally, there’s the InGen team’s resident paleontologist, Dr. Robert Burke (Thomas F. Duffy), who has an interesting history behind him. You see, one of the franchise’s leading technical advisors is paleontologist Dr. Jack Horner, who is somewhat infamous in his field for his dogged insistence that T. rex was exclusively a scavenger in real life, which is a source of rivalry with fellow paleontologist Robert T. Bakker. As such, Horner decided to make Dr. Burke a caricature of Bakker, who is stupid and incompetent at his job and eventually dies when he mistakes a milk snake for a venomous coral snake and stumbles into the doe Rex’s jaws. However, this intended portrayal is undermined not only by his being by far the most pleasant of the InGen group but also by Duffy working alongside Bakker at a dig site to prepare for the performance. Either way, if Horner’s goal in pushing for this portrayal was to get a rise out of Bakker, he failed. Upon seeing Burke’s death scene, Bakker called Horner to say, “See, I told you that T. rex was a hunter!”
If the original Jurassic Park film is a 9/10 (only being held back from a perfect score by some aspects of its adaptation process from book to film), then I’d give this film a 7/10. It’s definitely a downgrade from the original, with notably fewer moments of wonder than its predecessor, and also held back by some questionable choices in how it portrays some of its characters. However, the special effects are just as good, if not better, than the previous film, the acting is excellent (especially from Goldblum and Postlethwaite), several of the action sequences are just as memorable as those of the last film, and it gives as one of the best characters in the entire franchise with Roland Tembo. It may not be the greatest film in the franchise, but I would argue that it’s a worthy sequel.
Join me next time to see if Jurassic Park III is also an overheated sequel or just a watered-down shadow of its predecessors’ former glory. I should note that next time may be a little further off than usual, though, as my sister is getting married next week, and I may become a bit preoccupied with assisting in the preparations. But until then, stay safe, stay away from San Diego when InGen tries to set up shop there, and I’ll see you all very, very soon, I hope. Thank you, buh-bye!
It is absolutely imperative that we work with the Costa Rican Department of Biological Preserves to establish a set of rules for the preservation and isolation of that island. These creatures require our absence to survive, not our help. And if we could only step aside and trust in nature, life will find a way.- John Hammond
