# Lost World: Jurassic Park, The (1997)

### reviewed by
Christina Gross

                         The Lost World: Jurassic Park

                            A movie by Steven Spielberg

With Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, Pete Postlethwaite

The lights are on but nobody's home. This is a movie without any storyline worth mentioning, a bunch of good actors who aren't allowed to act and marvelous dinosaurs. Let's start with the good things. The computer generated dinosaurs as well as the animatronics seem even more real than in 'Jurassic Park'. I also liked the way they were used, exept for the T. rexes who had to be the typical small family. It was for the sake of the dinosaurs that I don't regret having spent more than two hours in a movie theater. I didn't even care that the dinos were shown off without any story worth mentioning to wrap them up in. Let's hear it for progress. Too bad that so many movie makers think they don't have to care about anything else if only they creatively play with their special effects .Why worry about something like a good script, for example. The few strings of story David Koepp wove to connect the dino scenes can only be called annoying.

Cynical, serene Ian Malcolm as we know him from the books and the first movie has changed into a chauvinist jerk. Even Jeff Goldblum can't save the part. The script condemns him to save his seemingly stupid girl friend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) from the dinosaurs. She allegedly is a paleontologist familiar with predators. Still she breaks even the most simple of rules like don't touch the young, don't walk around in bloody clothing. Apart from that she utters cool speeches, stares into the camera and screams.

Oh, well, as we all know women only watch this kind of movie only for their boy friends' or husbands' sakes. So why create a credible female lead that women in the audience can identify with and rob the guys of this cozy "Women!" -feeling.

Isla Sorna, the dinosaur island, is a paradise for real men. On the good guys' team apart from Malcolm we have Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn), radical environmentalist, lovable on-duty macho and one-man-backup-plan and nice Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff) who ends up being the only good guy eaten by the T. rexes.

On the bad guys' team there are Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite), the Great White Hunter with the noble heart who is looking for the ultimate trophy and psychopathic dino-torturer Dieter Stark (Peter Stormare) who first meets a swarm of compies and then his maker because his pal prefers to listen to his walkman instead of Dieter's cries for help. Morale: evil always is punished justly.

For a negative role model the men are presented with wimp Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard) who may be rich but no real man. Even his own men rather follow Nick Van Owen. Tsk, tsk.

Michael Crichton could have saved himself the trouble of writing a sequel to 'Jurassic Park'. All that is left of it in David Koepp's script is the trailer scene and some names. My favorite dinosaur scenes are taken from the first book. The rest is stolen from other movies - oops, sorry, that's called hommage. John Wayne certainly would have loved the technical advancement of animal catching in the 'Hatari'-scene.

About half way through the movie I reached the point when I didn't want to see another face staring open mouthed into the camera or another vibration in a puddle. But there was no mercy... In spite of all this I cannot help but admire Steven Spielberg. How he could keep a straight face in various interviews as he claimed to have focused on character developement is beyond me. Maybe he should take up acting.

And once more the dinosaurs are not wiped off the face of the Earth, as Michael Crichton had planned in his first dinosaur book. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) suggests to maintain a dino reservation on Isla Sorna. I see another sequel coming up. Money can keep rolling in when real men want to measure their strength against the prehistoric giants. Who needs Marlborough Country...

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