The Lost World: Jurassic Park
When the head of Universal at the time, Sid Sheinberg, greenlit “Schindler’s List” for Steven Spielberg, he insisted that the director make “Jurassic Park” first. The reason? He wasn’t sure if Spielberg could go from the emotionally draining experience of “Schindler’s List” to an escapist adventure immediately after. When Spielberg made “The Lost World” four years after “Schindler’s” (his first film after that film), it was easy, even then, to see what Sheinberg was talking about.
I’ve never read Michael Crichton’s follow-up novel upon which this is based, although I’ve heard I’m not missing anything. Spielberg’s film, and it’s script by David Koepp, doesn’t really inspire me to seek it out. I’ve never out-and-out disliked the film, but it has always lacked the sense of awe and wonder of the classic original film. Adventure? This movie has that in spades, but whether it’s successful in that respect has never been a resounding “yes.” The fact is, Spielberg has never been the same filmmaker since “Schindler’s List,” and while his dramatic instincts have flourished with films such as “Saving Private Ryan,” “Lincoln” and “Munich,” this is one of only three purely escapist films he’s made since then, along with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and “The Adventures of Tintin.” The thrilling “Tintin” aside, that trio doesn’t quite hold the same envy over his skills as the likes of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” do, do they? “Tintin” is the last of those, though, so maybe Spielberg is getting his groove back, and “The Lost World” was just a necessary bump in the road for the filmmaker. Watching “The Lost World” again, though, there are glimmers of the master craftsman who gave us those earlier films– it’s just that the story the film tells is hardly an enjoyable one to watch.
There’s a meme that’s been going around the internet for several years showing Spielberg in front of the triceratops from the first film (obviously a production photo from the making of that film) used to parody the big-game hunting photos people post after they’ve taken down an animal for sport. There’s a certain irony to the proliferation of that, though, because I had forgotten that “The Lost World,” at it’s core, is about the contrast between how some people view the animal kingdom vs. how scientists see it. The main characters of the film, led by Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm, are scientists with a respect for nature’s amazing power, whereas the human antagonists, led by Arliss Howard’s Peter Ludlow (now the head of Ingen, John Hammond’s company that first created the park) and Pete Postlethwaite’s Roland Tembo (a hunter Ludlow hires to capture the dinosaurs for transport to a park in San Diego), seek to exploit the dinosaurs for profit, and for Tembo, personal glory by hunting a male T-Rex for himself. It’s not hard to see which way Spielberg comes down in this debate– he respects nature, and you’ll notice that by the end, there’s not much of the hunting teams left, while the scientists (Malcolm and Julianne Moore’s Sarah Harding) save the day when Ingen, inexplicably (but predictably), brings a T-Rex back to San Diego, along with it’s baby.
With the exception of Malcolm (whom Goldblum continues to shine as), there aren’t really too many memorable characters, although Postlethwaite is the epitome of a classic “great white hunter” stereotype, and Peter Stormare is enjoyably slimy as his second-in-command before he is killed midway through. Sarah Harding is hardly a high-point of Moore’s career, and Vince Vaughn (whom Spielberg cast after seeing “Swingers”) isn’t given much to do as nature photographer Nick Van Owen. As Malcolm’s daughter, Kelly, Vanessa Lee Chester has a nice moment using some gymnastics against a velociraptor, but she’s hardly given much more to do than be afraid. This is part of where Koepp’s script fails, as we don’t get an emotional connection with the characters like we did in the first film. This just jumps right into the action, and while there’s something to be said about that in some cases, in this type of film we need moments like the one with Alan Grant and the kids in the tree with the brachiosaurus or Ellie and Hammond talking over ice cream or the scientists talking in the tour cars. It feels like Spielberg and Koepp took criticisms about the story and characters in the first one to heart, but didn’t take the right lessons from said criticisms. That means the characters in the film are simply fodder for the dinosaurs, and yes, seeing these beasts run rampant is part of the fun, we need a balance between spectacle and story. The first film had it, critics be damned; this one, not so much.
One thing this film does have that mirrors the first film is John Williams, who writes an equally brilliant score this time out. As he did with the “Star Wars” prequels, he doesn’t rely too heavily on his established themes from the first film and instead gives the film a musical identity all it’s own. His score helps turn the set pieces Spielberg has in store, such as a T-Rex family’s attack on Sarah and Malcolm’s trailer and a raptor hunt in the high grass heading towards an abandoned research center. And then, there’s the sequence in the end where a T-Rex runs wild throughout San Diego. Look, this is a comically absurd scene, designed to remind us of the climax of “King Kong” and the “Godzilla” franchise. As part of the narrative, it’s ridiculous, and let’s face it, you know where it’s heading, but it is kind of fun to see the T-Rex strut it’s stuff on the mainland a little bit, and Williams’s score is a big part of that. It also is evidence of something Spielberg said interested him about making the first “Jurassic Park,” and how seeing dinosaurs interact with environments was more interesting than seeing them in a terra ferma like their own. It’s a far cry from the original’s visitor center-set climax in the suspense category, but it’s an enjoyable capper to a film that doesn’t have many moments that can generally be seen as “fun,” but has just enough to keep it from being a disappointment from the man who made it, and was dipping his toes back into a genre he seemed to emotionally leave behind with the film he made before this one.
