I’m doing something a little different with this 5 Favorite Things post. You see, it’s no secret that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is far and away my favorite movie of all time, and it would be pretty much impossible for me to select just five elements of that film to talk about, but what about the sequels? Well, Jurassic Park 3 is not exactly terrible as much as it’s just limp and lacklustre, but The Lost World is a movie that, depending on the day, I can either love or hate. There’s so much right with it, but unfortunately there seems to be just as much wrong. So, here’s a rundown of 5 Things I love about the movie, but also 5 Things I kinda hate. Be warned, this post contains spoilers. First up, here’s what I love:
5. The Team: I’m a big fan of films that have a team of key members, each with a specific set of skills, and with a great rapport between them. Think Ocean’s Eleven, or The Magnificent Seven. There’s a similar dynamic here, with the team sent by John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) to document the dinosaurs living wild on Isla Sorna, the island upon which the dinosaurs were raised before being shipped to Islan Nubar, where Jurassic Park was set. We’ve got the returning Dr. Ian Malcolm (albeit in a much more muted down sense, more on this later), his palaeontologist girlfriend Sarah (Julianne Moore), videographer Nick (Vince Vaughn) and tech-guy Eddie (Richard Schiff). They are all played by actors I’ve grown to really appreciate in other works, particularly Schiff, whose turn as Toby on The West Wing was my favorite character across the series. You may have noticed I didn’t mention the girl, Kelly, supposedly Ian’s daughter, played by Vanessa Lee Chester. You’re right, well done, I didn’t mention her. Chances are I will later.
4. The Hunting Sequence: There’s a lot of great scenes in this movie, but I narrowed it down to just two for this list. Unfortunately the “Stay out of the long grass” scene and the Rex camp attack didn’t quite make it, but one that definitely did is the hunting scene. It is our introduction to the second team on the island, as coordinated by Arliss Howard’s Peter Ludlow, John Hammond’s nephew and the new guy in charge of InGen, formerly Hammond’s company. These guys, of which there are at least a few dozen, are not here to observe, they’re trying to capture the dinosaurs and take them back to America, where they will be installed in a zoo in San Diego. The team is equipped with jeeps and trucks, cages and hunting equipment, and it’s a different man vs. dinosaurs dynamic than we’ve seen before, because here the men are chasing after the dinos, and not the other way around. Also, there’s a lot of interaction between the CGI dinosaurs and not CGI humans, such as the bucking and rearing parasaurolophus (loving referred to as the Pompadour”) throwing guys around as they try to tie it down. Even today I think it looks pretty seamless.
3. Compys!: I’ve often asked myself whether I love Jurassic Park because of the dinosaurs, or I love dinosaurs because of Jurassic Park. Either way, as far as I’m concerned the best addition to the roster in The Lost World is the compys, or procompsognathus, to give them their proper term. Before now the only dinosaurs we’ve seen that are smaller than a football have been babies, but now we finally get to see how dangerous something roughly the size of a squirrel can really be, especially in large numbers. The death of Peter Stormare’s character, Dieter, is one of the best in the franchise, as he gets chased down and continually pecked at by these creatures he laughed at and electrocuted earlier in the film. Were dinosaurs around today, I’m fully aware having something like a velociraptor for a pet would be all kinds of awesome, but also one very specific kind of death for me, along with a headline of “Yet another idiot killed by his dinosaur pet, when will the madness stop?”, but I think a compy might just work, as long as it’s just the one, and in a very strong cage.
2. The Cliff Scene: This is the second scene that I mentioned earlier, and it’s really the highpoint of this film. During the raid on Ludlow’s camp, Nick and Sarah discover a baby T-Rex that has been in order to lure the adults back to the nest for capture. The do-gooding duo make the frankly insane decision to take the infant back with them to their R.V., perched atop a cliff, in order to patch the child up. Ian joins them whilst Eddie and Kelly are safely out of the way in the High-Hide, a tree-top safety area. Of course, as was the original plan, the adult T-Rexs track down their wounded offspring, and set about attempting to make anyone involved extinct, which in this case means rolling and bashing the R.V. about, then pushing it off a cliff. Entailed within this is some incredibly tense sequences – Julianne Moore on a shattering plate glass window above a fall to certain death, Eddie coming to the rescue by desperately attempting to pull the truck back up using his tow cable, a stellar unbroken shot of Eddie trying to tie the rope off to a tree, panning down and over the cliff to see Nick, Ian and Sarah all hanging expectantly – it’s this single sequence that would make the film worthy of existence, should it be in any question. Once Eddie shows up, it becomes so tense that you almost forget there’s dinosaurs in the film, what with the struggle now being against gravity. Yes, some bits annoy me – Sarah believes her best course of action is to get up on all fours whilst on the window, instead of lying flat to minimize the pressure – but still, this is the best scene in the film, easily.
1. Pete Postlethwaite: As far as character actors go, few are as beloved by me as Pete Postlethwaite. Here he plays Roland, a big game hunter and taking on the role vacated by Bob Peck in Jurassic Park as the movie’s biggest badass. Apparently Spielberg saw him and felt compelled to cast him, purely because he looked like the most badass person he’s ever encounter, and would therefore be perfect as the film’s deadly serious, battle scarred hunter, whose only mission is to be given the chance to hunt a tyrannosaur. If I have a complaint, it’s that he’s not in the film nearly enough, being present only really in the film’s mid-section. It makes sense plot-wise, but dammit I wanted more, even if it gives him one of the greatest walking-away lines when he turns down Ludlow’s job offer at the zoo with “I believe I’ve spent enough time in the company of death.”
And now, here’s what I hate about The Lost World:
5. The Climax: I’ll kick this off by saying that I don’t actually dislike that the final act of the film takes place in San Diego, with an adult T-Rex rampaging through the streets in search of it’s stolen child. As with the hunting sequence, it’s something new, something different, and there’s a lot of good action and humor in the scenes. My main issue, however, is that it only features three of the surviving characters we’ve met so far, Ian, Sarah and Ludlow. Ludlow is of course promoting the arrival of the ship containing his dinosaur to the media, whilst Ian and Sarah attempt to sabotage everything. As it turns out, no sabotage was required, and the animal breaks loose on it’s own. Surely it would make sense for Nick to be present, given how against this situation he was, but instead he’s just been written out and forgotten. I’ve also always felt that this scene was tacked onto the end of the movie when they realised they’d only clocked in at 90 minutes and didn’t have a satisfying ending. However, credit must be given for the Japanese businessmen running away from the T-Rex yelling “Gojira!”, and the poster in the video store for an adaptation of King Lear starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
4. Peter Ludlow: As much as Roland is a badass, Peter Ludlow is a snivelling little shit. As a villain he’s pathetic, and you immediately hate him from his first appearance usurping Hammond in his own mansion, so as the villain he plays his part well, but I’ve just never liked the character, especially when compared against Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) in the first film. Ludlow is entirely devoid of characterisation, and in fact only really has one moment that I ever remember, which is his wide-eyed money-bags response of “OK!” to Roland in the jeep during the hunt. A big summer blockbuster like this needs an equally exciting bad guy, but alas we just didn’t get one. As deaths go though, his is quite a nice one, and symbolic too. Also, and this is hardly a defect against the character, but it’s something that annoys me. During the film there’s a live video call from Peter on the island to the board of directors back in America, so that they can be shown the dinosaurs and the plan for the park. During this call, Peter displays a scale model of the park, which he brought with him to Isla Sorna. Why? Surely it would make more sense to have the model sent to the meeting room, instead of flying it to a remote island, and carefully transporting it around without destroying the clearly elaborate and fragile model? It was obviously built in American anyway, as I can’t believe that amongst the team of hunters there’s a couple of model makers, architects and engineers designing the zoo.
3. The Gaping Plot Hole: OK, here I might be getting a bit petty. Plot holes in general do tend to annoy me, but this one is so blatant, and the entire third act hangs upon it, so please bear with me. When the ship carrying the adult T-Rex arrives at the dock, it ploughs straight onto land because there are no humans on board. No living ones, anyway. The only sign of life is the T-Rex, trapped in the hold and raring to rampage, having been given untested quantities of sedatives and stimulants, but there’s bits of the crew scattered everywhere, including in very small rooms the Rex could never have reached. How, exactly, did these people die, and if it was the Rex, how did he get trapped back in the hold, when the release button is wedged into the severed hand of a guy on deck? Apparently the original plan was for there to be raptors on the boat too, who would escape and wreck havoc, but those scenes were never filmed. Fine, OK, no problem, just include one single line of dialogue in the movie, along the lines of “The raptors… they must have gotten out! Look, the Rex ate them!” Problem solved. I don’t normally get too hung up on these kinds of quibbles – for example, the cliff edge that magically appears where a goat was standing mere moments before in Jurassic Park has never bothered me – but here it’s so much more annoying because it could have been rectified so easily.
2. The Girl: See, told you I’d mention little Kelly again. It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of kids, and therefore don’t appreciate them in my movies. I tolerate them in Jurassic Park because they give Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) something to rescue, and they allow for one of the best scenes in that movie, in the kitchen with the raptors. Here, however, Kelly adds nothing to the film. Ian was already set on coming to Isla Sorna to rescue Sarah, so throwing in Kelly seems like pandering to a young audience. He already has a damsel in distress, why arbitrarily add another? I’m pretty sure the first time I saw this film – maybe aged thirteen or so? – I breathed a sign of relief after we had the initial girl vs. compys interaction, then brief cameos from Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards reprising their Jurassic Park roles, as that must surely fulfil the child quote for this movie. Alas it was not to be. Also, I’ve always been annoyed by the line Nick has about their being some kind of resemblance between Ian and her, because there isn’t. None at all. It’s just one of the lines meant to trick the audience into believing the line of dialogue, like when the nerdy girl is described as being unattractive and repellent, despite in effect being a swimsuit model with bad glasses and a ponytail.
1. Seriously, The Fucking Girl: This isn’t a case of me not being able to come up with five negative points – I could have quite easily discussed how the character of Ian has changed dramatically since the first film (which is understandable, given that a movie entirely focussed on that character would implode under it’s own charisma and sexiness) – but as it is I just really hate the girl. Or, more specifically, her one key moment, when she fights a velociraptor with gymnastics. This is her big pay-off, with the barely touched-upon storyline that proved Ian was a bad father when he didn’t know she’d been cut from the school’s gymnastics team. Now, Kelly and Sarah are trapped inside a shed-like building, with multiple velociraptors attempting to open the shed like a tin can and eat the delicious human-shaped sardines inside. After roughly a solid 60 seconds of furious digging at the walls, Sarah and Kelly discover, just like Yazz and the Plastic Population realized in 1988, the only way is up, so they climb into the rafters of the building. Ian joins them, and a raptor follows him up. He and Sarah are clueless as to what to do, but Kelly has an idea: acrobatics! A raptor is about to eat her Dad, so she yells “Hey, you!” at it, because fuck dialogue, so the raptor turns, curious as to what this puny child could possibly do, and then watches her swings around some conveniently positioned parallel bars, before kicking the raptor through a window and onto some equally-conveniently positioned spikes, impaling it and saving the day. I hate this God damn scene so God damn much. It’s ridiculous, as it makes the raptors, which were previously these unstoppable killing machines – just think back to Grant’s speech to the obnoxious kid at the start of Jurassic Park – and turns them into something that can be outsmarted by a petulant child and some intermediate P.E. lessons. If Kelly hadn’t been in the script, the scene wouldn’t be there, and the film would be so much better because of it. Ian and Sarah would both have climbed onto the roof and attacked the raptors with roof tiles instead.
Are you a fan of The Lost World? Or do you hate it? Or, like me, are you not sure? Let us know in the comments.
