The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): To Step Aside, and Trust in Nature
Preceded by Jurassic Park (1990/1993): Life Finds a Way.
Jurassic Park was never really intended to have a sequel. Fans of Michael Crichton wanted a sequel to the original novel, but he hadn’t ever written one before, afraid it would either be too derivative of the original or too different. After the success of the film, Steven Spielberg, who also wasn’t known for sequels beyond Indiana Jones, was interested in making a sequel film, and requested Crichton write the novel so they could manage. Eventually figuring out an idea, Crichton wrote the novel the next year, and it was released in 1995.
Jurassic Park: The Lost World’s novel is alright. It definitely comes off as a sequel that wasn’t really as organic or fully thought out as the first book. The action and horror sequences are just as great as the first novel, and the first act is a great setup, but it just meanders for most of the plot and reiterates on the first book’s themes in significantly less depth (the same is often said of the film, but I disagree). It’s not as memorable or thoughtful, but still has some great moments and Crichton is no worse in his writing style.
The film, however, is a much more interesting case. After the book was released, Crichton wasn’t really consulted much about the film’s script, which was written by David Koepp on his own. Only a few ideas were really even adopted from the novel: Ian Malcolm being brought back as the protagonist as well as a few other characters, the Tyrannosaurus couple and their broken-legged baby, the second island idea, and the trailer cliff sequences were the only overarching points taken from book to film.
More than anything, Jurassic Park: The Lost World was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World and its 1925 film adaptation than by the novel, as well as by the 1962 film Hatari!, which is about animals being captured for display at a zoo. It also reincluded a lot of the sequences from the original book, such as the opening scene being a reference to the death of the baby in the opening of the novel, the T. rex attack under the waterfall, and the death of Dieter Stark being inspired by the death of John Hammond in the book via a flock of Compsognathus.
The Lost World’s depiction of a Tyrannosaurus vs. The Lost World: Jurassic Park’s.
Jurassic Park: The Lost World, released in 1997, is probably the most polarizing movie in the series, with many considering it pretty bad as a film, and some even within the scope of the series, while others consider it by far the best sequel and even at times on par with the first movie, and I’m much more on the latter side of the argument. I think without a doubt it’s the best Jurassic Park sequel, and it isn’t even close. At the same time however, it doesn’t have anywhere near the same brilliance and near perfection of the first movie, and is flawed in a lot of ways.
In its favor is the return of Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, whose presence was sorely missing from much of the first movie’s second and especially third acts. While he does retain a lot of his charm and humorous wit, he’s much more somber and serious in this movie, traumatized by the events of the first movie. Having breached his NDA, he tried to tell the press what had happened, but most people refused to believe it, and as such he lost some of his credibility, more often than not seen as a paranoid alarmist while InGen, the company responsible for the park, covered it all up. He comes off as a much more beaten down man, and throughout the film acts as the straight man to the rest of the characters, compared to the more comical position he filled in the first movie, filled with one-liners and sarcasm.
Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park vs. The Lost World.
Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond also reappears briefly, introducing the main premise of the film. There’s a second island, Isla Sorna, where all the dinosaurs were initially bred before being transferred over the Isla Nublar. During the hurricane that took over Jurassic Park, the entire facility was destroyed and all the dinosaurs were freed, and now the entire island is solely populated by the creatures forming a complete ecosystem. Hammond sends in a team wanting to document the animals and observe their behaviors as a sort of biological preserve, safe from human interference. InGen wants to pillage the island and take the dinosaurs for a new park, and hopes that public opinion could sway favor towards keeping the island safe. He notes that he’s trying not to make the same mistakes as before, but of course, Malcolm says he’s “making all new ones.”
It’s an interesting expansion of the first movie’s ideas, and a great source of development towards Hammond’s character, clearly inspired by the words of Ellie to feel rather than think, though Malcolm is valid in his criticism as well. He cares more about the people being put at risk than fixing the mistake Hammond himself caused, but at the same time, those mistakes are alive. Is it fair to leave those animals on the island to be taken, used by those too greedy to realize their error, or should we leave lives in the hands of nature for the sake of an environment that never should have existed?
It’s an intriguing question, but the film presents it as less morally gray than it might seem, since the options are either to leave the dinosaurs alone or let InGen take them to the mainland where they could wreak havoc in San Diego? The hypothetical results we see later on, and the stakes of the observation mission are much more personal for Ian. Interestingly, though, the long term effects of the choice to leave the dinosaurs to their own devices is a domino effect that ended in the world being inhabited by dinosaurs in the long run. Maybe it was inevitable that dinosaurs would make their way into the world, human nature would dictate that we’d try to play God no matter what, and the best option would be to take out of the world what we brought into it and restore things back to their natural order, something the first novel actually commits to by napalming the island. It’s an interesting moral dilemma even if it’s not discussed as thoroughly as I’d like it to be in this movie.
A lot of the characters and dialogue are both this movie’s greatest strength and weakness. Eddie Carr, played by Richard Schiff, and of course Ian Malcolm, are great characters, and the former’s demise is one of the most memorable and saddening in the series, which I’ll get to later. In particular, Roland Tembo, played by the late Peter Postlethwaite, is one of the greatest characters in the series. He’s a calm and collected game hunter whose main goal, rather than money, is simply to hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex. His performance is exceptional, holding an air of authority over the entire cast, managing to out-charisma even Jeff Goldbum, and is painted in such great shades of gray. Most hunters in this series would simply be shown as evil, vindictive killers, but Tembo is portrayed as someone who respects the animals and, just as Malcolm does, has personal stake in the mission.
Most of the main cast of The Lost World; from left to right, Sarah Harding, Nick Van Owen, Ian Malcolm, Kelly, Roland Tembo, Ajay Sidhu, and Dieter Stark.
His close friend (or more, depending on how much subtext you read into), Ajay Sidhu, ends up being killed by Velociraptors. Tembo, saddened but successful in his capture of a T. rex, is offered up a job at the new park, but he politely declines with the line, “I believe I’ve spent enough time in the company of death,” and quietly leaves, likely leaving hunting behind. It’s a somber reminder that these hunters were just people doing a job, not the cartoonish villains we’ll see later in the series.
However, a lot of the main cast is somewhat weak and none of them other than Tembo really have any sort of arc. Nick Van Owen, played by Vince Vaughn, is given almost nothing to do and is barely in most of the movie, Sarah Harding, played by Julianne Moore, makes a lot of dumb decisions someone of her profession as a paleontologist likely wouldn’t make, and Kelly, played by Vanessa Lee Chester, adds nothing to the movie other than its most laughable scene in which she uses gymnastics to kick a raptor out of a window.
Notably, Arliss Howard’s Peter Ludlow is indicative of the exact thing I mentioned in the first Jurassic Park, where rich capitalists are portrayed largely as greedy and inhuman. I think it works well enough for this movie since he’s not entirely evil, and feeds into the dilemma the film presents. He proposes that the dinosaurs have no rights because they were created by InGen, and as such they have all the right in the world to take them, which brings up a lot of questions about whether or not a man-made living thing should have the same rights as a naturally born animal. This whole argument goes back to films like Blade Runner, with the proposition that a living thing created by man is still a living thing regardless of what purpose we created them for. Later movies would take what depth Ludlow had and just turn him more into the stereotypical evil rich guy, so it certainly could have been worse.
Some of the dialogue also isn’t great, with the occasional unnecessary joke, scenes where characters talk over each other, and a real lack of any sort of thoughtful discussion of the philosophy this movie seems to have or any character building moments. Like I said, almost none of the characters really grow from beginning to end or don’t serve much purpose as compared to the first movie, where every character was either pretty useful or had a solid arc throughout the story. It’s a much more action-oriented movie with a much larger cast, like the Aliens or Terminator 2 to Jurassic Park’s Alien or The Terminator, and chooses to prioritize big setpieces and action sequences over character building, though it’s a lot less solid than either of those two masterpieces.
After setting up the other characters, we get our transport to the island scene about 20 minutes in, and get one of my favorite aspects of this movie: the soundtrack. The original Jurassic Park soundtrack is iconic, but I’m really glad John Williams did something new with the score and I vastly prefer it over the first movie’s. Like the film itself, this soundtrack is a lot more adventurous and mysterious as compared to the grand magic and sentimentality of the tracks in the first film. The film itself is more action-packed, so the soundtrack is much faster paced, and is a lot more naturalistic in aesthetic than the first, so we get more experimentation with rhythmic percussion like shakers and hand drums, and the horror is amped up from the first, so we get more dark brassy segments and big hits of bass drums and timpani.
The main theme in particular is so vastly different from the first movie. Jurassic Park’s theme is quiet, sentimental, almost a little somber, and slowly builds into a glorious, choir filled climax that speaks to the tone of the film, while The Lost World’s is immediately exciting, beginning with drums and low woodwinds, and it only continues to build in excitement and danger until its own climax, bursts of high instruments punching through the air, speaking directly to the movie’s direction compared to the first. Listening to either, I could close my eyes and visualize both incredibly distinctly, something that isn’t true of most of the movies that came after. While it’s not as diverse musically as the first movie, and not as memorable, I like how it’s integrated into the movie and interwoven into its overall aesthetic more than the first movie, which I felt had a bit of an overbearing, if again incredibly memorable, soundtrack during some of the first half.
In general, I think The Lost World is also just a monumental step up visually from the first movie. In terms of cinematography both films are excellent, but in terms of effects it’s barely a contest. As compared to the first film, which only had one sequence of a large group of CGI dinosaurs (the Gallimimus stampede, which is probably the most poorly aged scene visually), one of the first set pieces of the movie is composed almost entirely of a herd of animated dinosaurs. The game trail scene shows how far the visual effects have come in just four years as a group of assorted dinosaurs stampedes through a plain in broad daylight, surrounded by cars and motorcycles chasing them down for capture. What would’ve looked a bit shoddy with the technology and experience of the first film still manages to look good today in this film.
The practical work on this movie is also incredible. Now having three Tyrannosaurus animatronics, one for each Rex parent and one of the baby, we get a lot of fantastic close up shots of the creatures and the sheer detail put into them. While most of the dinosaurs in the first film were a dull brown color, the Tyrannosaurus couple actually displays sexual dimorphism, visual differences between the genders of the animals. The female Doe Rex looks similar to the first movie’s being a brown color with light stripes, while the male Buck Rex has a large neck waddle, more pronounced brows, and is more vibrant in color, being green with a yellow underbelly and bolder stripes. The baby Rex, which is cute while not being cartoonish like a lot of other baby dinosaurs in the series, is able to be determined as a male because of the detail that went into the creatures’ biology. The other dinosaur animatronics are also largely on par or an improvement over the first, with more movement capabilities and much more vibrant colors, notably the tiger-colored Velociraptors that appear later on.
The animatronics of The Lost World.
Not all of the effects are just spent on the dinosaurs. This movie’s most iconic scene, easily the best non-dinosaur action scene in the series and second only to the Rex breakout in intensity, is the trailer cliff scene. The two-part trailer that the group is camping out on the island out of is shoved off of a cliff by the T. rex parents. While half of it dangles off the cliff, Sarah falls onto the glass front window. While not as dead silent as the Rex breakout, the sound design is still incredible, with the glass slowly breaking beneath her hands before it shatters just as Malcolm gets to her and the rain pouring down.
Eddie Carr, the equipment expert played by Richard Schiff, throws down a rope, but then the trailer starts creaking as it slides through the mud and off the cliff. The next few minutes is a frantic rush as Eddie tries to keep the trailer from falling off the cliff, keep the rope holding the people in the trailer connected, and they attempt to climb up. The music is frantic, percussion keeping quick pace while orchestral hits annunciate the panic and only building as it becomes more and more precarious, but eventually the Rex parents come back and tear Eddie in half, and the trailer falls, the trio on the rope barely being missed as it falls onto the rocks below, exploding. They climb back onto the cliff, and the music climaxes in a moment of tragic salvation as the InGen hunters pull them back up onto the cliffs, having heard the commotion.
The Buck Rex stares through the window of the trailer, and a photo of it on set.
Everything about this scene is incredible, from the mostly practically done set piece of the trailer, to the music, to the fantastic lighting and camera work. It’s one of my favorite action scenes in any movie, and like the Rex breakout, it’s absolutely the peak of this movie. From here on, most of the rest of the movie is largely about escaping the island, and we get a few other huge action sequences, like the Rex Buck attacking the camp, the other most iconic scene in the film, the Velociraptor attack in the long grass, and the raptors attacking in the village.
We also get one of the best horror scenes in the series. One of the hunters, Dieter, strays off to take a leak, but ends up tripping and getting lost. He comes across a small flock of Compsognathus, one of which he had tazed earlier, and they begin to follow him down a creek. They’re hesitant and curious at first, but as he begins to tire and fumble, they swarm him. He falls behind a tree, and soon his screams grow quiet while blood flows through the stream. The first movie definitely had some good horror moments, but I appreciate that The Lost World does its best to be even more intense and scary than the first movie whenever it can, it’s as close to the tone of the original novels that a PG-13 rating would allow.
Credit to Universal and Dark Knight.
Eventually, the group finds their way off the island, and it seems like the movie should be over. However, with another 25 minutes left, The Lost World pulls out its most divisive trump card, and one of the biggest plot holes in any film I’ve ever seen. The boat transporting the Buck and baby Tyrannosaurus rex - the S.S. Venture, named after the boat that transported King Kong in the 1933 movie - crashes into the docks at San Diego. The crew has been completely dismembered, and it appears as though the Rex had gotten out and then been re-contained by a brave crewmate, who still ended up being killed. Despite all this, there’s no evidence of damage to the ship itself, so most of the crew should’ve been safe from the dinosaur, most obvious of all the captain whose hand is still attached to the steering wheel as if he was pulled through a window or door. It’s been discussed since the film came out how this could have possibly happened, and there still isn’t really a solid answer other than storyboards showing the Rex getting out of its harness during the voyage. It’s not a well executed scene and definitely the worst part of the movie, but it’s worth it for the payoff, I think.
The T. rex in San Diego sequence, a homage to a Brontosaurus being set loose in London in the 1925 The Lost World adaptation, is one of my favorites in film. It gets a lot of criticism for being unnecessary padding, which is a valid criticism. You could entirely remove it and the boat crash scene and the plot would be essentially unchanged, and the series itself only mentions it one more time after, but I just like it way too much to really care. It might just be my love for schlocky monster movies about some huge creature going berserk in some big city (the scene even includes a Godzilla reference with some Japanese people running and screaming, “we left Tokyo to get away from this!”), but I thought it was the perfect climax to this movie. A dinosaur on the mainland is also just something we wouldn’t see again in the series until Jurassic World: Dominion some 25 years later, and in much lesser quality.
It’s the peak of the visual effects of the movie, with all of the best CGI, and some great animatronic, shots of the Tyrannosaurus, some phenomenal vehicle stunts with cars flipping over and a bus being slammed into, and a few references, like the aforementioned King Kong and Godzilla references, as well as David Koepp himself appearing as a victim of the Rex, credited as “Unlucky Bastard” in the credits. It has a lot of small funny moments as well, like a gas station 76 ball rolling by, someone calling in animal control, and the police immediately retreating the second they see the dinosaur. It’s just a really fun, well-directed sequence that I enjoy immensely despite it being inessential to the film, and remains the best we’ve seen of dinosaurs in a big city.
Credit to Universal.
Eventually, the Rex is captured and contained, Peter Ludlow is eaten by the baby Rex, the two animals are sent back to the island; and we get a brief final scene. Ian, Sarah, and Kelly sit on a couch, the couple asleep while Kelly watches a broadcast of the Rex’s transport back to the island as well as a special message from John Hammond, the last time Richard Attenborough would appear in the series. In one of my favorite quotes, he says, “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.” The reiteration of the main thesis of this series up to this point is brought together with the moral philosophy of this movie.
Nature does not need humanity to continue, and we should never try to play with the power it holds. Now that we have, though, we have to make a choice: choose to deny our mistakes and not take accountability, making all new ones in the process with the same hubris that caused them, or choose to leave the power of nature alone, living with what we’ve done. Life will find a way, despite and often in spite of what humanity has brought upon it. The dinosaurs have been brought back, and instead of playing God once more and resetting things back by wiping them out after miracle after miracle has kept them alive, trusting in them, untouched by our hands, is probably for the best.
I’m probably giving this movie much more credit than it deserves, but I found that it had me thinking a lot more than I anticipated, at least after I was done with it. It’s nowhere near the greatness of the first movie, often flawed and occasionally not as in-depth in both theme and plot as it probably should have been. It’s visually some of the best of the entire series (which is a bit sad considering this is a 25-year-old movie), has a few really great performances, has loads upon loads of perfect action/horror sequences, and has probably the most unique soundtrack in the series post-original, never relying on the first film’s iconography for its style. In fact, I could say that for most of the movie.
While almost every sequel feels like a reiteration of both of these first two movies, The Lost World feels like something different from the first, perhaps not in its structure, but in its aesthetic. It feels darker, but also still has a lot of the same magic of the first film in a very different way. It’s exciting watching a huge caravan of hunters trek through a jungle, a redwood forest, and big grassy plains, free of most of the fences and industrialism of the first movie, and just as much so to see this so starkly contrasted by the other extreme, seeing a T. rex on the streets of Southern California. Seeing the “civilization reclaimed by nature” aesthetic is great, and it’s used to great effect in the later sequels, but it’s interesting to see nature interacting with humanity in such a disparate and violent way rather than trying to coexist with it.
Despite all of its flaws, and there are some gaping ones, I still love Jurassic Park: The Lost World to death, and it remains my favorite movie in the series. It’s not as great as the original, but I still think it’s a solid sequel that still had a lot of the same charm and enjoyment of the original. It got a pretty mixed reception, but broke several box office records regardless, though not quite as substantially as the first movie, and of course another sequel was announced in 1998. However, it wouldn’t have a lot of the same crew returning unlike The Lost World, and as such, we got the most maligned movie in the series.
Continued in Jurassic Park III (2001): With the Best Intentions.
