Why So Angry?

THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK

Reviewed by Matt Brown
May 13 2004

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is so exactly the film that a director like Steven Spielberg makes after a self-imposed 4-year hiatus from filmmaking, when his last film before the break was the Oscar-spinning mega-drama, Schindler's List. It's neither an easy lap around the track for someone returning to the director's chair, nor is it an opportunity to shed all the gravity for a little while and have some fun with one's friends. Nope, it's the first tortured offering from an artist who has found his muse... and now doesn't have the slightest idea what to do next.

The Lost World is not a terribly good film. In spite of this, like A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, it remains a somewhat interesting one. For all the degree to which Spielberg's past works were windows into his childlike soul, the vantage point in Lost World is among the most telling. It's an incredibly angry, savage little fucker of a flick, the perfect biproduct of shoehorning a newly-minted "serious director" into the exact same film form he left behind, mere months before starting the film that gave him his artistic street cred. The confinement chafes, and Spielberg acts out. The result is a movie completely devoid of any of the wonder or charm of its predecessor (because Spielberg no longer feels any of that wonder or charm himself), but containing a genuine ferocity towards the genre (because he doesn't want to be playing in this sandbox any more, at all) and an apathy towards the niceties of plot-driven filmmaking (because who needs plot when you could be having Art?).

I said it the first time I saw it and I've been repeating it ever since: The Lost World is just mean. Admittedly, sometimes this meanness works in droves to bring out a dark glee that serves the picture quite well; most other times, however, it's just a big boring downer, a "fuck you" to the audience so loud and unequivocal that it was hard to leave the theatres in 1997 without feeling more than a little dirty.

The "plot," such as it is, is so formless and uninvolving that I can't actually call it to memory right now, except to recall that it does actually pull off the impossible trick, and sling Jurassic Park's funny man, Jeff Goldblum, right back into opposition with those crazy genetically-engineered dinosaurs that he swore he would never, ever go near again. The shtick this time is that he's more in conflict with fellow humans than he is with the dinos: it seems there's a thicket of hunters on the island, intent on bagging themselves some prey; Malcolm and his gang of do-rights want to stop them.

It's not that it couldn't have been a good idea; it's just that it's done so poorly. As usual, Spielberg assembles a crack cast - Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, Pete Postlethwaite - and they do the best they can with the material, but there's nothing there to play. The Lost World is exactly what all the critics accused Jurassic of being: completely devoid of any human story, at all.

Fortunately, The Lost World has exactly three things going for it:

1. Location, location, location. (That's just the first thing, not all three.) A number of plates and establishing shots are done in Hawaii, as on the first film, but they are outstandingly supplemented by truly breathtaking location work in the Redwood forests of northern California. Eked out by an aggressive greens department that does an excellent job of blending the "forest" with the "jungle," and a trigger-happy Janusz Kaminski lensing his first Hollywood adventure movie, Site B is a hell of a beautiful place to tell a story... too bad they couldn't think of one.

2. Music, music, music, music. This is a truly outstanding John Williams score, even outstripping the original film's work. Williams, too, seems to be feeling a bit of malaise about his trip back to the island; unlike Spielberg, however, he uses it as an artistic opportunity, cranking out a Korngoldian masterpiece that elevates even the most humdrum moments in the film with lush, ripe excitement.

3. That scene. Yup, for all the relative uselessness of its surrounding elements, The Lost World does contain what is probably the masterpiece suspense sequence of Spielberg's entire career: the T-Rexes vs. the Trailers scene, which bisects the movie like so much accordion tubing. From start to finish, no single scene has ever run riot over me (and the rest of the audience) like this. As spidery cracks appear in the glass that is (barely) supporting Julianne Moore's weight, I was nowhere on this earth. It's a cinematic goldmine.

That's the three, and the rest hangs in rags. Spielberg's unnecessary coda with the T-Rex assailing San Diego demonstrates one thing with perfect clarity: this sequel to Jurassic Park was really only an excuse for the director to get his ya-yas out on whatever elements of dinosaur adventure he hadn't been able to fit into the first film, before turning the franchise over to the lesser mortals. I was pretty unhappy when this flick came out... but when I compare it to Jurassic Park III, I can only say to myself, "at least it had three good things going for it."