MOVIE REVIEW: "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" (1997) · 4:06pm Sep 26th, 2020
Something has survived! Will you?
John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) summons chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to his home with some startling information -- while nearly everything at his Jurassic Park had been destroyed, his engineers happened to have a second site, where other dinosaurs were kept in hiding. It seems the dinosaurs on the second island are alive and well and even breeding; and Hammond wants Malcolm to observe and document the reptiles before Hammond's financiers can get to them.
So I finally got around to seeing this movie in full on Netflix last night. I liked it well enough, but it's not as good as the first Jurassic Park movie (but then, none of them are).
I liked the basic story, but it's got it's fair share of holes in it, I think. There are some character decisions in this movie that are just really, really dumb. Consider Sarah Harding, a supposed animal behavioral expert, who upon discovering a baby Stegosaurus, a juvenile of a more testy herbivore species, gets right up close of it to take pictures like a tourist. Is it any wonder they charge her?
This one is definitely a bit more graphic than its predecessor as well. One character is swarmed and eaten alive by chicken-sized Compsognathus (featuring a lovely shot of one of the little demons gnawing on his lip), another is stomped on by a T-Rex and briefly dragged underfoot like a bug on a shoe sole (although I must confess, this one gave me a bit of a dark chuckle), and yet another is literally ripped in half by the film's Tyrannosaur pair like a dark parody of Lady and the Tramp. The fact that the latter is killed trying to save his friends from going over a cliffside, and his just generally being a nice guy, makes it all the more heartrending to watch (no pun intended).
The film's climax, in which the male Tyrannosaur is tranquilized and brought to San Diego where he then escapes and wreaks havoc, is probably my favorite part. It's about ten minutes of a dinosaur rampaging through a major city, and I was smiling like an idiot the entire time.
The VFX are pretty good for the most part, definitely standing with those of the first films'. However, I couldn't help but notice one particular scene in which a character is holding the baby T-rex–you can actually see the animatronic wires leading down from its middle, and once you see that it's really hard to unsee it.
John Williams once again delivers with his music, as per the norm. This one features a great deal more "jungle drums" than the first movie's soundtrack, which I like quite a bit.
All things considered, I'd give it a 7/10. Not the best thing in the world, but as a dinosaur island adventure flick I found it entertaining enough.
I personally really enjoy The Lost World JP as a movie. (And despise Doug "Douchebag" Walker for his so-called review of it.) It's a perfectly entertaining follow-up to the original Jurassic Park movie, that has plenty of thrills, scares and suspense to make a superb adventure film with some pretty dark (literally and figuratively) sensibilities.
It's also miles better than the movie that came right AFTER it, at least in my opinion. I've never understood people who say that they think Jurassic Park 3 is a good movie, or even better than The Lost World.
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Oh yeah, I enjoyed it too. My problems with it aside, it's a film I'll gladly watch again.
Honestly, I don't think anyone really says JP3 is better than TLW these days. There are parts of it that I do like, like the Spinosaurus and the Raptors (especially the Raptors, probably my favorite dinosaurs in the JP franchise aside from the Rex family in TLW and the Indoraptor in FK), and Eric Kirby is probably the best child character in the whole franchise. But other than that...yeah, it's not a good one. It doesn't even really add much to the franchise's overall story.
The Nostalgia Critic...yeah, I've never really been into him either. I only watched him sporadically, and I only thought he was funny when he was stuck with a movie that's generally agreed to be really, really bad, like Foodfight! or the animated Titanic films. It was actually his review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that got me to quit him entirely. Then I found out about #ChangeTheChannel, and that sealed the deal for me.
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Oh no, I've seen a few comments here and there about that. This is something I bicker with my father about on, because while he doesn't like JP3 at all (he says it insults the audience's intelligence) he also thinks that TLW is too preachy, which annoys me to no end because that just puts me in mind of Doug Walker's bitching.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I used to be something of a fan of the Critic. But I got away from his videos after a certain point, long before Fallen Kingdom came out, and then after the #ChangetheChannel thing came out... well, let's just say that when I'm in a bad mood, I like to cheer myself up by imagining horrible things happening to that smug, screechy hypocritical asshole.
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I just imagine him getting stuck watching Foodfight for all eternity.
I don't watch internet reviewers often, but I do watch Atop The Fourth Wall from time to time. I like Linkara, and I like how in recent years he's gone out of his way to deconstruct and avert the "sociopathic reviewer" character that Channel Awesome seemed to foster. He seems like a genuinely good guy.
I kind of hope to do a similar show my self someday. I've even been plotting out some of the story arcs in advance.
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Damn, that's a good one!
Yeah, Linkara's honestly a pretty good guy from what I understand. I fell out of watching his show, but I've never heard a negative word against him as a person, which really says a lot in my opinion.
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He was one of the guys who spearheaded #ChangeTheChannel, IIRC. All the other people involved spoke very highly of him.
I also think it's funny that when he was still with Channel Awesome, he was the only guy who could really cow the Critic.
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I'd heard about that clip, but never seen it before now.
Jesus I'd forgotten just how screechy Doug was. Did I *really* used to find that guy funny?
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A question I ask myself on occasion.
Anywho, I liked this one warts and all. I also went back and watched some of the deleted scenes. I definitely think they ought to have kept Roland Tembo's original introduction in the movie.
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I love that deleted scene. I wonder if it got cut from the film because someone thought that Roland might overshadow the other characters, given just how *good* that introduction was? XD