Speilburg’s "Lost World" suffers from lost storyline
By James Brundage
Thursday, May 22, I go to the UA at Marketfair expecting to reserve a ticket to "The Lost World"’s first showing tommorrow. What I see surprises me, four shows at 10, 10:15, 10:30, and 10:45. I proptly buy a ticket for the ten o’clock showing so I can have my pride as a critic and see what’s destined to be this summer’s biggest blockbuster before anyone else. Being the neurotic that I am, I make sure that I get my seat an hour early in the front row and center and proceed to take out the book that I brought and read a few chapters that were assigned as homework.
At Ten O’clock, the movie comes on and I watch attentivly, chewing popcorn and paying attention with my critical eye. The movie opens on Isla Sorna, part of Les Sinco Mortes (The Five Deaths), eighty-seven miles southwest of Isla Nublar (The site of the ill-fated "Jurassic Park"). Even though, with the cinematography, I am sure that the island that this one was filmed on was the same as the first. The stereotyped British family is relaxing on the island just before their daughter is bitten by compys (something from the first novel).
Just as the mother begins her pitiful scream, you see Ian Malcom (played by Jeff Goldblum) on a background of a jungle in a subway station, heading to see John Hammond (who wasn’t even in the novel). There is a time consuming cameo by the kids Tim and Lex from the first movie and then a begruged confrontation between Hammond’s nephew (Arliss Howard). Upon meeting Hammond, he is told about Site B (Isla Sorna), and also informed that his girlfriend, Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), is already on the island.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is all that it takes to start the movie, in contrast to the hour that "Jurassic Park" took to get into the thrills.
As soon as you are on the island, and for the next hour or so, you are confronted with original thrills after original thrills, and David Keopp is actually half-decent as a screenwriter (In my mind, he is the bane of modern literature). However, in contrast to the first movie, this one has almost no elements of similarity save a scene involving a trailor, two parent T-rex’s and a vicious attack that defies belief.
For that hour I was truly dazzeled as a watcher, getting my pulse as high as ninty-five beats per minute (was it the movie or was it the fact that it was so cold in the theater?). For about forty minutes, the T-rex’s dominate, acting so much better than in the first one. But for the last twenty minutes of that hour, it truly gets fun as the velociraptors wreak total havok upon the party of explorers on the island.
Then the movie doesn’t take itself seriously at all.
After that mystic hour, you end up seeing the T-rex in San Diego, where the movie parodies itself and other things such as "Speed", "Godzilla", and "Speed 2".
Now I have to get brutal as a critic.
The CGI’s (Computer Generated Images) are low quality compared to the ILM standard, verging on a word which, because of the high-school nature of this publication, I cannot say. The script has almost no dialogue and is the absolute worst adaptation of a novel that I have ever seen.
I will close with this. "The Lost World" was over-hyped, and not anything that I expected. It was a movie to see for the laughs but not one to see for the thrills. I can sum it up in two words: Nothing Special.