Stuff I Grew Up With/Franchises: Jurassic Park. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Since Jurassic Park was such an important part of my childhood, I, naturally, hoped that there would be more. While my mom and, I think, my friends at school told me, a couple of years or so after the movie came out, that there were rumors of a sequel, nothing ever came of it, at least that I ever learned of (keep in mind, as a little kid, I wasn't exactly privy to movie gossip or the trades or anything of that sort). And I'd kind of written it off when, in early 1997, as had been the case with the first one, Mom and I saw a TV spot which made it official: a sequel was indeed coming and going to arrive that Memorial Day. Once again, I don't quite remember the specifics, but I do remember the most tantalizing thing about that TV spot: there were going to be two Tyrannosaurs this time. That alone got me really excited and soon, like before, more ads started coming, toys started hitting the stores (and yes, once again, I got a bunch of them; when my birthday came around that June, Mom took me on a shopping spree with my two cousins and I grabbed every Lost World toy she would allow), and finally, Mom and I went to see the movie after I got out of school for the summer. In fact, it's the only movie I've ever seen in the theater twice, because my aunt and her boyfriend also took me to see it as part of a late birthday outing for me. And, unlike the first one, which I didn't get my own VHS copy of until I was like twelve or thirteen, I did end up with this on video when it hit the shelves in November of 1997, as my mom bought it for me out of the blue (I didn't ask, she did it just to be nice). So, taking all that into account, you're probably expecting me to say that I love it just as much as the first one. However, ever since I first saw it in the theater as a nine-year old, and despite having watched it many, many times since, my feelings about The Lost World: Jurassic Park have always been mixed. 

Overall, I do really like it, as there is a lot to enjoy. It's another exciting adventure, with a number of great setpieces, characters that I find myself liking (for the most part), more amazing special effects and kickass dinosaurs, both old and new, another great score by John Williams, and Steven Spielberg again proving that he knows how to do crowd-pleasing spectacle. But, at the same time, there's always been something missing. For a long time, I couldn't put my finger on what it was but, now, I think I've figured it out: the sense of wonder that absolutely permeated the first movie is almost completely absent here. You still have it in small doses, like when the characters first arrive on the island and come across the herd of Stegosaurs, and the dinosaurs are again treated with a sense of pathos, but for the most part, this one does often feel more like a monster movie. Like I said in my review of the first one, that's not a huge issue for me, and I also guess that, after the first one did such a good job of portraying the wonderment, there was no way the sequel could hope to recreate it in a manner that wouldn't come across as stale and "been there, done that" (the movie does have that problem in another way, which we'll get into), but it is noticeable. Also, while I do like a lot of the characters, some of them do a lot of really dumb, as well as morally questionable, things. And while it is exciting and fun for the most part, this one does drag a lot more, whereas the first never felt like it was dragging, and the third act climax, while cool, suddenly feels like you're watching a completely different movie.

The Bowmans, a wealthy British family, come upon the island of Isla Sorna while on a yacht cruise and weigh anchor to spend the day on its lovely beach. Their young daughter, Cathy, wonders off by herself and comes upon a small dinosaur, a Compsognathus, which she hand-feeds. However, this draws in a large group of the creatures, which prove to be quite vicious, and they attack her. Meanwhile, Dr. Ian Malcolm, whose academic reputation was destroyed by InGen after he publicly talked about what happened at Jurassic Park, is summoned to John Hammond's estate. Hammond's greedy nephew, Peter Ludlow, is now in control of InGen, having used the incident with the Bowmans to take the company away from his uncle. Malcolm also learns from Hammond that Isla Sorna, or Site B, is where the dinosaurs were actually bred and nurtured before being moved to the park on Isla Nublar. The complex on Sorna, as well as the dinosaurs, were abandoned shortly after the disaster at Jurassic Park, when a hurricane hit, and yet, the dinosaurs have been flourishing. Over the years, Hammond has been trying to keep the island's existence hidden but, with Ludlow's takeover, he knows that his nephew plans to exploit it in order to keep the near bankrupt InGen afloat. In order to stop him, Hammond needs a complete record of the dinosaurs to gain public support and has put together a small research team to accomplish this goal... a team he hopes Malcolm will join. Malcolm initially refuses but, when he learns that his girlfriend, paleontologist Sarah Harding, has already been sent by herself, he joins the expedition for the sole purpose of rescuing her. Upon reaching the island and finding her, things quickly go south, as Malcolm not only learns that Sarah has no intention of leaving, but that his daughter, Kelly, has stowed away on the trip. Then, Ludlow arrives with a team of hired mercenaries and they begin rounding up dinosaurs, intending to take them back to the mainland. The group manages to stop them, but in the process, both teams become trapped on the island, with no communication equipment, and are forced to journey together through the dangerous interior in order to reach the old compound and contact a rescue team.

Development on a Jurassic Park sequel was officially announced by Michael Crichton in early 1994, who felt compelled to write a follow-up novel because of the enormous success of both the first book and the movie, as well as demands from fans of all ages. Also like with the first film, he'd already been talking with Steven Spielberg about the movie adaptation. The Lost World was published in the fall of 1995 and, as would happen with the film version, it was very successful but had a more mixed critical reaction. The film's screenplay would again be written by David Koepp, with the big difference this time being that he would be the sole writer from start to finish. In fact, he and Spielberg had been discussing ideas for another Jurassic Park movie before Crichton announced his novel. For instance, in the Return to Jurassic Park documentary, Spielberg said he felt the hook for a sequel, which he considered while making the first movie, would be the lost can of embryos that Dennis Nedry stole. But when Crichton came up with his own ideas about how to continue the story, Spielberg decided to go that route instead. Speaking of the book of The Lost World, I, to this day, have not read it like I have the first one, so I'm not quite as clear on the differences between it and the film. From what I've read, it seems as though the film deviates much more drastically from its source material, with Koepp taking numerous characters, subplots, and scenes from the book while, at the same time, eliminating others, and even bringing in elements from the first book that they couldn't do in the first movie (like the opening with the girl being attacked by the Compies). In fact, from what I can tell, the movie completely diverges from the book around the halfway point, with the third act T-Rex rampage in San Diego being something that Koepp and Spielberg came up with not too long before shooting began.

David Koepp actually had a lot more on his plate with The Lost World in general. Besides being the sole screenwriter, he was also second-unit director, and in one instance when he was working in that capacity, he had to reshape a dialogue scene on the boat that brings the characters to the island, as the boat actually caught stuck on a sandbar! Moreover, there was an eight-day period during the shoot where Spielberg had to leave the set for personal matters, and Koepp was recruited to direct the main unit himself. While he had actually directed a film before, having to take over on a massive film like this was very daunting for him. However, thanks to a satellite linkup, Spielberg was still able to convey some direction. And Koepp even appears in the movie as a man who gets cornered and chomped on by the T-Rex during the San Diego rampage; his character is listed as "unlucky bastard."

Like with Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg was making his first true sequel with The Lost World: Jurassic Park. As he himself notes in the documentary, the Indiana Jones movies aren't really a bunch of sequels to Raiders of the Lost Ark; rather, they're different adventures that the lead character embarks upon, much like the James Bond movies. Here, we do have a film that's a direct continuation of the first's story, which is rare for Spielberg to be in the director's chair for. Sure enough, the only other film of his that became a franchise was Jaws, and he was not involved with those other three films at all. He also had kids begging him for years to do a sequel to E.T., but that's such a personal film to him that he opted to preserve its integrity by not doing one. When it came to Jurassic Park, though, not only did kids and other fans want a sequel, but Spielberg himself wanted to make one, given how much fun he had with the first. However, it took him a couple of years to finally recover from how exhausted he was after directing Jurassic Park and Schindler's List virtually on top of each other. And while he had already planned to make Amistad by that point, he didn't want his first movie after Schindler's List to be another hard-hitting, historical drama. Rather, he wanted to do another bigger-than-life spectacle, i.e. something more familiar and comfortable, first. Interestingly, history virtually repeated itself with Spielberg in 1997, as The Lost World was released in the summer and Amistad that December. But this time, the former proved to be very successful but not as critically lauded as the first, while the latter got pretty good reviews but didn't do too well at the box-office.

Maybe it's because it has less of that sense of wonder of the first film and is more of a straightforward monster/survival movie, but it feels like Spielberg was going through the motions on The Lost World. It's still very well directed and, again, proof of his ability to make big blockbusters, but it feels like his heart wasn't quite in it the second time around. In fact, Spielberg has admitted that, as production went on, he lost his enthusiasm for it, and in the book, Jurassic Park: The Ultimate Visual History, he says that, while developing the screenplay with David Koepp, he realized he was likely going to move on from the franchise afterward. That's why the third act in San Diego was added, as it was something Spielberg had initially planned for a third Jurassic Park, one where the dinosaurs would get out into the world (in other words, Jurassic World: Dominion decades before the fact). And even in the behind-the-scenes footage of him directing that sequence, Spielberg says, "It suddenly is a Godzilla movie, and I just have only dreamed of making one of these as a child. As a grown-up, I'm ashamed of myself," before chuckling. I have a feeling this attitude was due to what I said in my review of the first one, about his having made Schindler's List, which he admits did change him, and now transitioning towards darker, more hard-hitting stuff for the most part. Maybe he felt it was time for him to "grow up" as a filmmaker and leave these kinds of movies behind. I personally don't agree but, it's his career so, what can I or any of us do?

Though he has more than his fair share of big, blockbuster movies on his overall filmography, The Lost World is the only time that Jeff Goldblum has ever headlined one of them. It's nice to see, being a big fan of his, and while the movie itself is rather mixed, I think he does a more than commendable job. While he was already fairly cynical in the first movie, here Dr. Ian Malcolm is portrayed as fairly bitter, with his sense of humor being much less light-hearted. He still makes jokes, mind you, but in a much dryer, more disillusioned and biting tone. He even looks more world-weary here, with his shorter haircut, five o'clock shadow, and lack of sunglasses. His mindset is perfectly understandable, as in the four years since he came back from Isla Nublar with a shattered leg, both his professional and personal lives have gone downhill. He's been publicly disgraced by InGen for talking about what happened, making him a laughingstock (as you see when some idiot on the subway annoys him), and causing him to lose all credibility in the academic world, as well as his job teaching at a university. As for his personal life, he has a very uneasy relationship with his daughter, Kelly, whose mother has pretty much abandoned them both. While it's clear that he does love Kelly, and tries to do what he can for her, he's not present in her life all that much, something she's now tired of. He has a similar relationship with Sarah Harding, who says that she's made a career out of waiting for him. And now, on top of everything else, he's summoned to John Hammond's estate, where he first has to deal with the despicable Peter Ludlow, and then learn from Hammond himself that there's another island filled with dinosaurs. Moreover, when Hammond tells him about how he's planning to send a team of people there to document the dinosaurs in a last ditch attempt to preserve it, Malcolm tells him that he's, once again, foolishly putting people's lives at risk, and in an even more dangerous situation, given how there are no fences or security systems this time. Giving Hammond a definitive "no" when he asks him to be part of the team, Malcolm intends to contact the other three members and stop them, when he learns that Sarah is one of them and has been sent on ahead, by herself. Angrily telling Hammond, "If you wanna leave your name on somethin', fine, but stop puttin' it on other people's tombstones," Malcolm leaves to immediately head to the island with the others, declaring that this is now a rescue mission.

Having been what he's been through, Malcolm not only warns Nick Van Owen and Eddie Carr about what they're going to encounter but is also the cynic when they arrive and the two of them are initially amazed at the sight of the dinosaurs. As they're marveling at the Stegosaurs, he has the classic line, "Oh, yeah, 'ooh,' 'ah,' that's how it always starts. But then later, there's running and, um, screaming." He quickly becomes frustrated with how nobody seems to understand how dangerous the place is, especially

Sarah, who jumped at the chance to go, despite all of the stories Malcolm told her about what happened on the other island. Much to his chagrin, she tells him that this is the one time she doesn't need him to "rescue" her, and he proceeds to tell her that what she needs is a good "anti-psychotic." As if he didn't have enough worries, they learn that Kelly stowed away, and she uses his own words against him, saying that when he earlier told her not to listen to him, he was basically telling her to come. Things get even more

complicated when Peter Ludlow and his team of hired mercenaries arrive to capture and transport dinosaurs back to the mainland. But while Sarah and Nick take care of that, Malcolm is more intent on trying to contact the boat that brought them in order to get Kelly to safety. Of course, fate has other ideas and everybody ends up stranded on the island, with no other recourse than to make their way to the abandoned InGen operations building. When they're not running from their lives from either the two Tyrannosaurs or the Velociraptors, Malcolm can't help

but stick it to Ludlow. After the groups are first forced to work together, and Ludlow claims they came prepared, Malcolm tells him, "Five years of work and a hundred miles of electrified fence couldn't prepare the other island. And you think that, what? A couple dozen Marlboro men were going to make a difference here?" Later, when they're walking in the rain and Ludlow starts acting all high and mighty, Malcolm tells him, "You know, when you try to sound like Hammond, it just comes off like a hustle. I mean, it's not your fault. They say talent skips a generation. So,

uh, hey, I'm sure your kids are gonna be sharp as tacks." He then adds, "Taking dinosaurs off this island is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas. And, uh, I'm gonna be there when you learn that." Sure enough, when the T-Rex gets loose in San Diego, Malcolm tells Ludlow, "Now you're John Hammond." He and Sarah then work together to lure the T-Rex back to the ship that brought him there, and by the end of the movie, the two of them and Kelly have apparently ended up together as a family.

I think it's completely impossible for Jeff Goldblum to not be funny, no matter how dark or cynical the character, and this film is proof of that. One funny running joke is Malcolm's continuous frustration with Eddie Carr's satellite phone, which he can never get to work when he needs it to. I especially like when, after he's learned that Kelly stowed away, he's trying to contact the boat and goes to Eddie, "Why in the hell, uh, doesn't this thing ever work?!" And when Eddie directs him inside the one trailer to see if the phone

will work in there, Malcolm gets even more frustrated, yelling, "Eddie, there's a hundred switches!" That comes back around later when, while trying to use the radio, he gets the frequency wrong and contacts some woman who thinks he's a man named Enrique. When she's later fussing at him, Kelly says, "Boy, is she mad at you," and he comments, "I feel sorry for that guy, Enrique." Then,  when Sarah and Nick bring the baby T-Rex into the trailer and start to operate on him, Malcolm is still in

the background, trying to contact the boat, at one point getting frustrated and exclaiming, "No, Carlos! Come in! Goddammit, you bastard!" Another instance is, when they first arrive and are looking for Sarah, and Nick yells, "Sarah Harding!", Malcolm comments, "How many Sarahs do you think are on this island?" That also comes back around when they're searching for Nick at the InGen compound and Malcolm yells, "Nick Van Owen!" In the trailer, when talking with Sarah, he sends Kelly outside, telling her this is some "tall talk," but then, minutes later, tells

her not to go outside. Also, when Sarah tells him, "You know, I have made a career out of waiting for you," Kelly interjects, "You know, Sarah does have a pretty good...", only for Malcolm to immediately cut her off, telling her, "It's so important to your future that you not finish that sentence." Finally, during the climax in San Diego, when he and Sarah first take the infant to lure the adult back to the ship, Malcolm comments, "When the adult sees that it's us once again with his baby, uh, isn't he gonna be like, 'You!'? You know, there may be some, uh, angry

recognition." Then, when they're leaving and some security guards show up, demanding to know what they're doing, Malcolm answers, "We're takin' the kid. If you really want to stop us, shoot us." And when they're being chased by the T-Rex, Sarah asks him to slow down, to which Malcolm, looking behind them at the dinosaur chasing them, counters, "Uh, I don't think so."

Julianne Moore's character of Dr. Sarah Harding, Malcolm's girlfriend and a behavioral paleontologist, is said to have met him when he was in a hospital in Costa Rica, recovering from his injuries. Having heard rumors about what was happening on Isla Nublar, she sought Malcolm out to see if they were true, and his stories about what happened only fueled her curiosity rather than frighten her. So, when Hammond told her about Isla Sorna and the situation at hand, Sarah not only jumped at the chance to be part of the research team but, according to him, insisted on going there by herself. Hammond comments that she, "Thinks she's Diane Fossey." And sure enough, when Malcolm and the others arrive and find her, Sarah is cheerfully going about her business, observing and photographing the dinosaurs. While she's shocked when she sees that Malcolm actually came, despite his obvious displeasure, she can't contain her excitement, as she runs up to him and starts going on about the herd of Stegosaurs they've just encountered. Not only is Sarah quite brave, as even after she's nearly killed by one of the Stegosaurs, she's still intent on remaining and documenting with Nick and Eddie, but she's adamant that she can debunk some old theories about dinosaur behavior by studying them in the wild, rather than making educated guesses like everyone else beforehand. Moreover, she feels that having worked around numerous species of predators throughout her life has prepared her some of the island's toothier inhabitants. And again, Sarah and Malcolm's personal relationship is on rather shaky ground. While she loves him, she feels that he's often not there for her, and says this is one time where she doesn't need him to come to her rescue. However, that conflict gets pushed to the side when they end up battling dinosaurs together, and seems to have worked itself out by the end, as they and Kelly appear to now be a family.

As much as Sarah does come across like she knows what she's talking about and doing when it comes to the dinosaurs and their behavior, I now realize that she makes a good number of questionable and downright dumb decisions. Following the scene with the Stegosaurs, she tells Nick not to light a cigarette because of the scent trail it would leave, saying, "We're here to observe and document, not interact." This after she went right up to and petted the baby Stegosaurus, which led to her nearly getting trampled

and gored by a couple of the adults. And speaking of scents, after her and Ludlow's teams are forced to travel together, she doesn't think to wash or remove the shirt that has the baby T-Rex's blood on it, leaving some of it on at least one fern during their trek, and hangs it up inside her and Kelly's tent that night. She might as well have left a trail of breadcrumbs for the adult Tyrannosaurs to find their camp, which is exactly what happens. When Roland Tembo notices the blood and asks her about it earlier, she not only

explains where the blood came from but says it's not drying because of the humidity. Again, given what she told Nick earlier about lighting a cigarette, you'd think she'd realize that's kind of a problem. Going back to earlier in the movie, she and Nick let loose the captured dinosaurs in the InGen camp, which, as I'll get into, is a course of action I have mixed feelings about, given the morality of it. Also, while she knows how dangerous it is for them to take the baby T-Rex back to their camp, and calls Nick out for it, she still allows him to do it, which leads to their nearly getting

killed. And while it happens while they're in the middle of operating on the baby's broken leg, you'd think she may find it important to answer the one trailer's phone when it rings (it's Malcolm trying to warn her and Nick that the adult Tyrannosaurs are aware that their baby has been taken). In fact, when it rings again, they ignore it completely, despite now being able to answer it! (Still, the following sequence does prove her theory about the Tyrannosaurs being loving parents.) All that said, I certainly don't dislike Sarah, and she proves more than able to handle herself in extreme situations, like when they encounter the Velociraptors or try to bait the rampaging T-Rex away from San Diego.

I'm normally not a big fan of Vince Vaughn, but back when I first saw the movie as a kid, I kind of liked him as Nick Van Owen (naturally, I had no idea who he was). Nowadays, while I still don't have a problem with Nick, and there are moments where I think Vaughn shows some true charisma, he also makes some morally questionable decisions. On the one hand, I do find him to be kind of cool, like when, after they've encountered some Stegosaurs and he's gotten some great shots of them, he boasts, "You can give me the Pulitzer right now, today, please. Competition's over, close the entries. I'd like to thank everybody who lost." And, when he tells the others that Hammond warned him about Ludlow's team possibly showing up, he comments, "He did send a backup plan... Me." However, that leads into the moral dilemma with him. Being an environmentalist, his natural instincts are to help the dinosaurs, first and foremost, and while it's commendable, especially after seeing Ludlow's team corral and capture a number of them, his methods are eyebrow-raising. Along with Sarah, he sneaks into the InGen camp and lets all of the dinosaurs loose, which not only likely leads to some people getting killed but also the camp's communications equipment being destroyed. That comes to bite them when his own team loses their equipment after their trailer goes over the cliff. Speaking of which, he's the one who takes the injured baby T-Rex back to the trailer, putting himself, Sarah, and Malcolm in serious danger. 

Funnily enough, when we first meet Nick, he admits that, while he does volunteer work for Greenpeace, that's because it's mostly made up of women, and when Malcolm comments, "That's noble," he counters, "Yeah, well, noble was last year. This year I'm getting paid. Hammond's check cleared, or I wouldn't be going on this wild goose chase." But once he gets on the island and sees that the dinosaurs are indeed real, that seems to inspire him to take the actions he does. And yet, when he first meets Tembo

face-to-face, the hunter instantly recognizes him, declaring, "You're that Earth First bastard," then adds, "Professional saboteurs," suggesting that Nick is no stranger to taking radical action in the name of nature. Nick kind of respects Tembo, though, telling him, "You seem like you have a shred of common sense," but they're still at odds with each other throughout the film, given the latter's determination to hunt down and kill the male T-Rex. This leads Nick to covertly remove the shells from Tembo's double-barrel riffle to ensure he won't be able to, but, again, that leads to

people getting killed when the Tyrannosaurs invade the camp, with a number dying from the Velociraptors because they run into the long grass in a panic. Strangely, when they reach the abandoned InGen compound, Nick goes ahead to call for help, which he manages to do, but since he's nowhere to be seen when the raptors attack Malcolm, Sarah, and Kelly in the nearby worker village, you're expecting that he got killed offscreen, like Ray Arnold in the first movie. But nope, after the others escape the raptors and make it to the helipad, Nick is there, waiting for them. That said, he completely disappears from the movie afterward, despite seeing what Ludlow is about to do with the T-Rex.

Of the four members of the research team, Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), the field equipment expert, has the most reserved personality, with not that many notable lines, and mostly comes off as awkward and really out of his depth, especially when he first sees the dinosaurs. Like the characters in the first movie, he's initially in awe, unable to say anything but "wow" over and over again following the scene with the Stegosaurs, but he soon sees the other side of it all firsthand. The most memorable thing about Eddie, and something I do get a kick out of, is the back and forth he has with Malcolm, again over how his satellite phone and equipment refuse to work when he needs them to. It starts right in their first scene together, where Malcolm is trying to use the phone to contact Sarah but it's not working, and he knocks it against the side of a vehicle, as Eddie goes, "Ow, ow, ow, ow! Don't do that. Don't do that. You gotta baby it a little bit. You gotta love it." Later, Malcolm is trying to contact the boat to take Kelly off the island and he grumbles about it not working, then knocks it on a vehicle's hood, to which Eddie comments, "Violence and technology: not good bedfellows!" Malcolm then asks him, "Is there any reason to think that the radio in the trailer might work?", and Eddie retorts, "If you feel qualified at all, you might try flicking the switch to on." But, despite his awkwardness, Eddie does come through in two important ways. One, despite Malcolm's joke about it, his "high hide" does prove to be effective, as it keeps anybody who's in it out of harm's way, especially Kelly during the sequence with the Tyrannosaurs attacking the trailers. Two, when Malcolm, Sarah, and Nick are trapped in the trailers when they're hanging over the edge of the cliff, Eddie comes to the rescue, trying to hook the trailers to his car and keep them from going over the cliff, and also giving them a rope to climb to safety. Unfortunately, Eddie ends up dying a grisly death when the Tyrannosaurs attack his car and tear him apart to share as a meal.

While I've also never minded Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), Malcolm's daughter, and actually think she's less annoying than Lex and Tim sometimes were at points in the first movie, she really did not need to be part of this story (she's mainly here because she's a character from Michael Crichton's novel, although she only became Malcolm's daughter in the screenplay). The only significant thing she does in the whole movie is kick a Velociraptor through a wall, something any of the adults could've done, and just so we could have a cute callback to when she told her dad that she'd been cut from the school gymnastics team. Otherwise, she's a fairly helpless kid who has to be led around by the adults. She comes off as fairly spunky and hard-headed early on, when she's calling Malcolm out on how absent he is in her life, to the point where he didn't even know she'd been cut from the team, telling him, "I'm your daughter all the time, you know. You can't just abandon me whenever opportunity knocks." And she's also precocious enough to stow away on the expedition and stay hidden until they've already set up camp on the island. But once she realizes how in over her head she is, she becomes, understandably, frightened, and stays that way for the rest of the movie. Even when they're in the helicopter and are lifting off from the island, she's still so traumatized by what she's been through that she's silently crying. As for that aforementioned conflict between Kelly and her dad, while it does go a little farther than Malcolm's relationship with Sarah, it also falls by the wayside once they're having to just try to survive the island. Finally, I've always wondered how she could be Malcolm's daughter when she's completely African-American, rather than having some Caucasian mixed in (I guess she's adopted). I used to worry that I was coming off as ignorant and a bit racist by asking that, but it turns out that it was something Steven Spielberg and David Koepp did consider explaining but decided not to make a big deal out of. (Also, didn't Malcolm say in the first movie that he had three kids? What happened to the other two?)

Reprising his role of John Hammond, Richard Attenborough appears only twice in the film, the beginning and at the very end, but Attenborough manages to make him just as endearing and, at the same time, multi-faceted, a character as before. When we catch up with Hammond here, four years after the disaster at Jurassic Park, he's just lost control of InGen to his greedy nephew and is also seemingly in ill health, given the IV you see at his bedside and his rather weak, frail physical condition. He also has a feeling of guilt about him over what happened, as his first line of dialogue, to Malcolm, is, "You were right and I was wrong. There. Did you ever expect to hear me say such a thing?" He then tells Malcolm about Isla Sorna, aka Site B, how the dinosaurs there were left behind to survive on their own following the hurricane that destroyed the compound, and that the island has since become a flourishing ecosystem. Now, in a final attempt to set things right, Hammond wants to ensure that these creatures he and his company created, and which he already showed genuine affection for in the first movie, can live in peace and solitude, separate from mankind and those who would exploit them. As Malcolm himself mentions, albeit cynically, "So you went from capitalist to naturalist in just four years. That's something." Speaking of which, it's interesting how Hammond's relationship with Malcolm has switched around from the first movie, as he's now more accommodating and friendly towards him, whereas Malcolm is the one who comes across as antagonistic towards Hammond, as opposed to how jokey he was with him when he wasn't warning him how dangerous the idea of Jurassic Park was.

While it's not quite to the extent that I feel about Nick Van Owen, I do have some mixed feelings about Hammond in this film. On the one hand, while he is, as Malcolm says, making another ill-advised decision regarding innocent people's lives by sending a research team to Isla Sorna (he also admits that he had to use the promise of money to get Eddie and Nick to go), his motives for doing so are understandable, as he needs documentation of the dinosaurs in order to be granted a non-interference

policy. Once that's done, he clearly intends to, as he says during his final monologue, step aside and let nature take its course. And not only is he racing against Ludlow, it's very possible that he secretly knows he's dying and is trying to accomplish his goal before it's too late, possibly adding a double-meaning to his telling Malcolm, "It's our last chance for redemption." But, on the other hand, I feel that the way he ropes Malcolm into it is rather low. Even though he says that Sarah came to him, jumped at the

chance to go to Isla Sorna, and insisted on going there before everyone else, and Sarah herself does validate Hammond's claims when we meet her, it was still low of Hammond to involve someone in Malcolm's personal life. And he actually tries to justify himself by all but blaming Malcolm, saying, "Leave it to you, Ian, to have associations, affiliations, even liaisons with the best people in so many fields." He's also remarkably flippant about Malcolm's concern over Sarah being there by herself, telling him, "She's spent years studying African predators. You know, sleeping

downwind and all. She knows what she's doing," as if that's adequate preparation for this kind of "safari." And when Malcolm declares that he's going with the team to save Sarah, Hammond's reaction suggests he was actively manipulating him into going all along. It's not the best look for him, and it's a shame that this would be the last time we would see Hammond in person, not counting his televised interview at the end.

Even though it's just a very brief cameo, and they're onscreen for maybe a little over thirty seconds (if you don't count their lingering in the background as Malcolm starts confronting Ludlow), it is nice to see Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello return as a slightly older Lex and Tim when Malcolm first arrives at Hammond's home. In the Return to Jurassic Park documentary, Mazzello says that he calls that brief appearance, "My Steven Spielberg graduation present," as he got enough money from that short bit of work to pay for his college tuition.

In retrospect, a disappointing aspect of the movie is how Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), Hammond's nephew and the new head of InGen, is portrayed in such a shallow, stereotypical fashion: a greedy businessman with an overwhelming sense of arrogance and snobbery about him (his being British only enhances that feeling), and doesn't care what happens to anyone else, as long as he's able to profit. His first scene, where Malcolm runs into him at Hammond's home, shows what an utter snake he is. Barely paying attention to Malcolm, who is utterly seething at the sight of him, while he signs something, it's highly suggested that Ludlow is either personally responsible for or had a major hand in Malcolm's academic reputation being sullied. As he accuses Ludlow of spreading misinformation and twisting the facts of what happened, Ludlow dismissively brings up that they put forward a "compensatory offer" for his injuries, which Malcolm says was, "A payoff and an insult." Ludlow then says, "As I recall, your university revoked your tenure for your selling wild stories...", but Malcolm denies taking any money and insists that he told the truth. After revealing that he's now head of InGen, he tells Malcolm, "These problems of yours are about to be rendered moot. In a few weeks' time, they'll be long forgotten." Malcolm grabs his arm as he walks by him, telling him, "Not by me," and Ludlow, in a moment of pure disrespect that deserved a fist to the face, sneers, "Careful. This suit cost more than your education."

As Hammond predicted, Ludlow doesn't waste much time in using his new position at InGen to exploit Isla Sorna for profit. While on the island, Ludlow proves to be especially out of his gourd, coming off as a twerp who's not at all cut out for work in the field, as Roland Tembo immediately has to dissuade him from setting up camp on a game trail. Once camp is set up, he attempts to enlist potential investors by showing off their captured specimens, as well as his plans for the park in San Diego, via a satellite link-up. Sarah

and Nick take care of that when they let the dinosaurs loose, but despite this and they're being stranded on the island and having to work with their saboteurs, Ludlow remains smug and confident. Malcolm, however, manages to put him in his place, telling that his attempts at being like Hammond are going to blow up in his face at some point. Sure enough, when Tembo manages to sedate the male T-Rex, Ludlow is eager to bring both him and the baby back to the park San Diego to salvage the company, only for the ship to crash into the port and the T-Rex to get loose and

run wild in the city. Ludlow becomes almost catatonic at this, but even though he, offscreen, tells Malcolm and Sarah where the infant is being kept, he's determined to at least keep the infant to ensure that InGen gets something out of the whole fiasco. However, karma soon comes to literally bite Ludlow, when the adult T-Rex arrives to defend his young, then allows the baby himself to attack and kill their exploiter.

In stark contrast to Ludlow, one character who's much more complex than just being a simple bad guy is the late Pete Postelthwaite as the big game hunter, Roland Tembo, the head of the mercenaries. This guy is just a bad-ass; a take no shit type of person who makes it clear to Ludlow during his first scene that he's the one in charge and he'd better do what he says if he doesn't want to get eaten, adding, "All you need to do is sign the checks, tell us we're doing a good job, and open your case of Scotch when we have a good day." He also doesn't care about money, telling Ludlow, "All I want in exchange for my services is the right to hunt one of the Tyrannosaurs. A male, a buck, only. How and why are my business." Right after they've captured a number of dinosaurs, Tembo, upon finding a sign that the Tyrannosaurs are nearby, leaves Ludlow to collect his "fee." He and his friend, Ajay, come upon the Rex nest, and then capture the infant and use him as bait to lure the male to where they're staked out. However, that plan goes up in flames when a piece of wreckage from the dinosaurs destroying the camp is sent flying right at Tembo and Ajay. Afterward, they find evidence of sabotage and, since they have no other choice, join up with the other group to travel to the old InGen compound and call for help. Despite these setbacks, Tembo is determined to hunt and kill the T-Rex. While he and Nick are walking in the rain, he explains his motivation this way: "Remember that chap about twenty years ago? I forget his name. Climbed Everest without any oxygen, came down nearly dead. When they asked him, they said, 'Why did you go up there to die?' He said, 'I didn't, I went up there to live.'" For him, hunting the T-Rex is really living to the fullest. 

I personally think they should've left in Tembo's original introductory scene, where Ajay finds him in Kenya to recruit him for the expedition (they do sometimes show this scene when the movie airs on TV). He's initially reluctant to get involved, as he feels he's hunted everything on the planet that's worth hunting and has nothing left to prove. He's so bored that, while he does it partly because a woman was being harassed, he picks a fight with a rowdy, drunken tourist and very easily beats the guy

senseless, with one of his hands literally tied behind his back. This would've made Tembo's need to hunt the T-Rex even more clear, and it also would've fleshed out his relationship with Ajay. You do get a feeling in the final film that Ajay is his best friend, as he always sticks close to Tembo, joining him in his Tyrannosaur hunt, and Tembo is very depressed when he learns of Ajay's death, but this scene shows that they do indeed have a very solid friendship (Tembo knows Ajay is nearby before he even sees him because he's wearing some aftershave that he sends him every Christmas) and have been on a lot of hunts together. Plus, it gives Harvey Jason a much more substantial scene and more dialogue than he has in the final version.

What's also great about Tembo is, while he doesn't spend much time lamenting the deaths of others, and can also be rather insensitive about it, as he's very dismissive about Eddie Carr's death, he does have a moral code and isn't going to put people in unnecessary danger or push them until they drop. Besides scolding Ludlow for ordering camp to be set up on a game trail, he has his men help Malcolm, Sarah, and Nick after they narrowly escape falling over the edge of the cliff with their trailers and allows

the group to take breaks during their trek across the island. Noticing blood on her shirt, which she leaves a trace of on some nearby plants, he asks Sarah if she's injured when they stop, and when they discover that Dieter is missing, he takes two men with him to search for him. He also advises Sarah not to let Kelly know about this, understanding that learning someone else is possibly dead would freak her out. And that night, he gives the group plenty of time to sleep before tackling the most difficult part of the journey, which is actually getting to the compound. Finally,

while he does end up downing the T-Rex, albeit with a tranquilizer dart due to Nick's sabotage, the deaths of Ajay and so many others makes it hard for him to celebrate. He turns down Ludlow's offer to work at the Jurassic Park in San Diego and, before leaving Isla Sorna. tells him, "I think I've spent enough time in the company of death," strongly suggesting that this will indeed be his last hunt.

Among the other members of the InGen team, Dieter (Peter Stormare), comes off as just a very standoffish dickhead who, when the groups join together, tries to start something with Nick. He proves pretty sadistic towards the little Compies, zapping one with his cattle-prod for no reason other than because he can, and that proves to be his undoing when he gets separated from the group and is attacked by a big group of them. Dr. Robert Burke (Thomas F. Duffy), the team's dinosaur "expert" (I put expert in quotation

marks because some of the information he gives proves to be very wrong; notably, he's the one who, according to Sarah, declared that the T-Rex was not an attentive parent), who's based on real-life paleontologist Robert Bakker (I initially thought he was based Jack Horner, another paleontologist and frequent advisor on these films), is the person who's most excited to be there, as he's thrilled at the sight of every dinosaur they come across. Unfortunately, he gets eaten by one of the Tyrannosaurs because he does the stupidest thing imaginable: he panics

because a freaking snake slithers into his shirt. First, it's a milk snake, which isn't even venomous, and second, buddy, you're cornered by a T-Rex. just grin and bear it! Finally, I have to mention this Hispanic guy, Carter (Thomas Rosales Jr.), who often works with but Dieter unknowingly contributes to his death, as he's listening to his Walkman when Dieter goes to relieve himself and is later yelling for help. Also, when the Tyrannosaurs enter the camp, Carter causes a panic by screaming at the sight of one of them, and gets stepped on by the female and ends up stuck to the bottom of her foot as she chases the others.

Before we move on, I want to say that, like in a lot of Spielberg's movies, there are many instances of overlapping dialogue, either with people talking over and interrupting each other, or two different sets of people talking at the same time. It does make things more realistic, as that's how it goes in real life, but here, I've always found it to be a bit irritating and hard to make out some of the dialogue. In the scene where Malcolm encounters Ludlow at Hammond's estate and they talk while the latter is signing several

documents, you have moments where the guy with the documents will tell Ludlow where and what he needs to sign, which I find distracting. The guy doesn't say much, and he keeps his voice fairly low, but it's still enough for me to notice and wish he'd shush. It gets even harder to pick out what anyone's saying when the two groups first join up, and Sarah tends to deliver her dialogue, which has a lot of scientific jargon, very quickly, making it difficult to keep up with what's being said. Maybe nobody else has an issue with this, and I can usually deal with it in Spielberg's movies, but I've always found it rather annoying here.

Wanting to visually differentiate The Lost World from the first film, Spielberg felt the sequel should have a darker look, citing that the film itself is darker in tone. Since Dean Cundey was unavailable to return as cinematographer, Spielberg instead turned to Janusz Kaminski, who'd shot Schindler's List and would become his go-to cinematographer from here on out. Sure enough, unlike Cundey's lush and often bright photography on the first one, Kaminski gave The Lost World a more contrasting lighting scheme, with a lot more shadows, and the dinosaurs themselves are often

backlit. Not only is this approach true of the nighttime scenes, which have a much blacker quality to them than the first's stark blueness, but the daytime scenes have more notable contrasting to the lighting, getting across the effect of the thick redwood forests and shrubbery that make up much of Isla Sorna. They also made the sequences in the rain feel colder and more miserable, like when the group is forced to walk in it, and the scene where they're walking across a field as dawn is breaking gives off the feeling that it's going to be the start of a fairly dreary day. Spielberg also

proves to still be at the top of his directing game here, with sweeping shots of the island and its interior, along with tracking shots of Malcolm and the group when they first arrive, Sarah walking along a shallow creek after they find her, and her and Malcolm making their way through the forest while talking. One of the best uses of camerawork comes when Dieter is stalked and killed by the Compies. First, after he tumbles down the hill, you get a series of quick POV shots as they rush him from all sides,

followed by an overhead of them swarming him. Shortly afterwards, after he's momentarily managed to fend them off, there's a very low-angle POV of their stalking him, and when they rip him apart behind a log, the camera pans over to the creek, as blood slowly runs down it. There are several instances of long, unbroken shots in the film, notably when, after the characters have escaped the Velociraptors and they run to the helipad, the camera follows them to the operations building, through the door, and out

the back, as they head up the stairs to the pad. The action and suspense scenes are, once again, filmed to perfection, with the roundup, which was especially complex to pull off because of the precise interaction with live-action and CG elements, looking quite dynamic, as do the trailer and campsite attack scenes with the Tyrannosaurs, the Velociraptor attacks, and the T-Rex rampage in San Diego. And like the first, there are some images here that just stick in your mind, like the two Tyrannosaurs attacking the trailers

and then Eddie in his vehicle, that awesome overhead shot of the Velociraptors closing in on the men in the tall grass before dragging them down below to munch on them, and the T-Rex loose in the city, the best of which is when he climbs up onto this ridge and roars at the skyline.

Like before, Michael Kahn's editing is not only superb (like how it transitions from the island to San Diego before the climax), but it also inspires some great instances of dark humor. At the beginning, when Cathy Bowman is attacked by the Compies and her parents come running, it comes from a shot of her mother screaming in horror, to out first shot of Dr. Malcolm, as he's standing in front of a tropical backdrop, which is revealed to be in the New York subway. Also, the mother's scream transitions to him yawning. Later, just after we've seen Dieter get eaten,

it cuts to Roland Tembo, who's just now learned that he's missing, and he decides to search for him, commenting, "If he's alive, we'll find him." Then that night, when he comes back, Tembo, upon being asked if they found Dieter, answers, "Just the parts they didn't like." And, during the climax, when Sarah asks Malcolm how they'll find the adult T-Rex, he answers, "Follow the screams," and it immediately cuts to a woman screaming in her car, before revealing the sheer mayhem that's happening downtown. There are other moments of visual humor

during this section, like when the T-Rex first gets loose and smashes through a customs sign that reads, "NO FRUITS, VEGETABLES OR ANIMALS BEYOND THIS POINT," or when Malcolm and Sarah head to the amphitheater to retrieve the infant and you see a screen read, "ANYONE CAUGHT TRESPASSING WILL BE PROSECUTED." When the T-Rex sends a big bus crashing into a Blockbuster video store, if you pause and look at some of the movie displays, you'll see that they include William

Shakespeare's King Lear with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack and the Behnstacks with Robin Williams, and Tsunami Sunrise with Tom Hanks. And, one that caught my eye as a little kid is when you see some Japanese businessmen among the people fleeing from the T-Rex, which I knew even then had to be a reference to Godzilla. David Koepp says they considered putting in subtitles that read, "I moved from Tokyo to get away from this!", but they must've figured that would be too much.

One thing that immediately differentiates The Lost World from the first movie is that we actually have some urban and rural settings this time around, as opposed to the more isolated and rustic areas we got before moving to Isla Nublar. Again, following the opening on Isla Sorna, we cut to Malcolm in the New York subway, which can be seen as something of a prelude to the extended urban action we get during the third act, when the ship housing the T-Rex crashes into the Port of San Diego, and the T-Rex then rampages through both the suburbs and downtown

(though, save for the shots of the skyline, those sequences were actually done in Granada Hills and Burbank, respectively). There's also a Jurassic Park amphitheater in San Diego that John Hammond built before deciding to set up the park on Isla Nublar, which Ludlow plans to use as the main facility of his own park. We only get to see it during the climax, when Malcolm and Sarah go there to get the infant to lure the adult back to the ship, but the exterior has that familiar design of the iconic big gate. Speaking

of Hammond, we get to see his estate, the foyer of which is elegant but also has a somber feel to it when Malcolm first arrives, coming off more like a mausoleum than a place of residence (it was actually a Catholic girls' school), leading into his contemptuous encounter with Ludlow and the revelation that Hammond has lost control of InGen. Hammond's bedroom/office has a similar feel, due to how dimly lit it is and the IV stand next to his bed. And when Malcolm first meets up with Nick and Eddie, it's in a large garage, where we see the trailers and vehicles being prepared before they're shipped to the island.

For Isla Sorna itself, the filmmakers wanted to differentiate it from Isla Nublar and thus, not just go back to Kauai (although, the opening beach scene with the Bowman family was shot there). Ultimately, they went with the forests up in Humboldt County, California, including the spectacular redwoods in Eureka and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, since these locations would line up better with research concerning the habitats of actual dinosaurs. When combined with the way in which the film is shot, these new locations give Sorna a much more

foreboding and uninviting feel to it. Instead of the bright sunshine, tropical heat and humidity, and vivid greens of Nublar, Sorna, despite still being near Costa Rica, comes off as overcast, rainy, and even cold and damp, with mist covering the mountaintops, the forest interiors often being dim, even when the sun is out, and the rainstorm that hits the island that first night. There are also big open fields and plains, one of which is where the dinosaur roundup takes place, sections of forest with large creeks running through them, large canyons and ravines, and, most

memorably, fields of long grass, where the team members are attacked by the Velociraptors. Speaking of which, there's also the major change from the first film, with the dinosaurs roaming completely free, with no fences or other boundaries keeping them contained. Specifically, the carnivores have taken over the island interior, while the herbivores stay along the outer-rim. However, both types prove to be very territorial, such as when the Tyrannosaurs attack the trailers after their infant is given back to them.

Speaking of which, the one specific home for a family of dinosaurs that we see is the Rex nest, which Tembo and Ajay come upon following the roundup scene: a spot deep in the woods, surrounded by the remains of their past meals, as well as literally buzzing with flies and other insects. It's also suggested that the Velociraptors' nesting sites are within or near the field of long grass. And beyond that, near the InGen base, is a freaking bone-yard, where the raptors and possibly other carnivores have fed on the bodies of

dead dinosaurs. Personally, though, while it works for the movie, this kind of environment has never appealed to me as much as the tropical jungles in the first one. Even if dinosaurs didn't actually live in such places, my brain can't help but associate them with it... largely due to Jurassic Park.

One thing I like is the notion of how, even though the existence of the island and the dinosaurs remain unknown to the world at large, the place has developed a local reputation, as the man who captains the ship that brings the research team to it refuses to get too close. He tells Nick that he's heard stories about fishermen who did so and disappeared completely, and adds that the island chain is referred to as La Cinco Muertes, or The Five Deaths. It doesn't go any further than that brief scene, but it's a little addition that I've always liked.

On the human side of things on the island, while Hammond's research team only has their two trailers and a couple of vehicles to work with, Ludlow's team sets up a very impressive base-camp, full of various captured dinosaurs, numerous vehicles, a large satellite uplink, and a tent where Ludlow gives his presentation to entice potential support, with a model of the amphitheater in San Diego. As for the abandoned InGen base that the groups head for after being stranded, it turns out to have been quite a large place, with the operations building having a main

door similar to that of the visitor's center in the first film, and a big mural of the park on Isla Nublar on the wall just beyond the door. Inside, despite the damage it suffered from the hurricane, and having since become overgrown, the communications center proves to still be operational when Nick goes inside to call for help. The immediate exterior, behind a fence and security gate, is a large workers' village, filled with all sorts of stuff like abandoned vehicles, construction equipment, and gas pumps, to name a

few. Some of the buildings here that get caught up in the characters' struggle against the Velociraptors include this little office where Malcolm faces off with one, a tool shed where Sarah and Kelly, and later Malcolm, are cornered by two of them, and a pair of rooftops where Sarah finds herself caught between a rock and a hard place. And beyond the operations building is a helipad where the survivors are picked up and taken to safety.

When I first saw the movie as a rather impatient nine-year old who wasn't really paying attention to dialogue, I assumed that it took place on Isla Nublar again, that the dinosaurs were running wild after the park was abandoned, and the operations building was the visitor's center, now broken up and overgrown. My mom seemed to think the same thing, and it was only during re-watches, as well as when I read the story and picture books that were put out, that we understood this was a completely different island, specifically where the dinosaurs were actually bred

and nurtured before being moved to the park. But even as a kid, that didn't gel with me, seeing as how Isla Nublar seemed to be the total base of operations, housing both the park and the laboratories where the dinosaurs were created, as seen in the first movie when the group gets the behind the scenes tour and witnesses the baby Velociraptor hatching from one of many eggs there, not to mention the embryo lab that Dennis Nedry breaks into. If they had all that, you have to wonder what the point of Isla Sorna, or Site B, was to begin with. The short answer is that it's just an arbitrary mechanism to make a sequel possible, something that not even Michael Crichton was immune to.

When I was gushing about all the merchandise from the first Jurassic Park that I had as a kid, I mentioned that I didn't have many vehicle toys, despite how cool the vehicles in the film were. When it came to The Lost World, not only did they introduce more interesting vehicles and gadgets, but I know for sure that I had some of those toys. These vehicles, like the movie itself, aren't as bright and vibrant as those in the first one, but instead have a very dark green, camouflage pattern paint-job. Hammond's research team come equipped with a pair of off-road vehicles

that basically just look like really sleek cars but, like the gas jeeps in the first movie, have hook and cables on the front, which Eddie uses to help the others during the trailer sequence. Said trailers, which are joined together to form one large research and housing unit, are probably the most memorable vehicles in the film, given how they're at the center of one of its best setpieces. The interior of the one trailer is really high-tech, with a sophisticated radio system, computer monitors, and a medical examination table

where Nick and Sarah repair the baby T-Rex's broken leg. The InGen team, on the other hand, has all sorts of vehicles at their disposal, which you get to see during the roundup and which look a lot like safari and hunting vehicles (I'm sure I had a toy one of these), as well as some guys on motorcycles. Some of those vehicles have hydraulic passenger seats that extend outward so the person can get a better shot at a dinosaur. The most notable vehicle is the "Snagger," which is basically a Humvee, but with a platform on its back where someone stands to fire tranquilizer darts, seats that extend off to its sides, housing men who lasso the prey, and retractable metal arms that ensnare the dinosaur and deploy airbags to secure it.

Among the other equipment the characters have at their disposal, beside the then cutting-edge satellite phones, is a "high hide," this platform that Eddie rigs which is raised up into the treetops to keep them out of sight. Although Malcolm derides it at first, saying it actually puts people in a "convenient biting height," it turns out to be very effective, as it keeps the Tyrannosaurs from noticing Eddie and Kelly. Eddie also brings with them a very large tranquilizer rifle, which fires darts containing a neurotoxin that's so powerful, "The animal's down before it actually feels

the 'pfft' prick of the dart." He also warns Malcolm that it's lethal for humans, saying that if you were to accidentally shoot yourself, "You'd be dead before you even knew you had an accident." In the end, a similar rifle is what Roland Tembo uses to bring down the male T-Rex when he realizes that Nick sabotaged his own gun. (One piece of equipment that didn't make it into the film but got made into a toy was a man-sized life-pod. It came as an accessory for a big T-Rex figure that could literally swallow both the pod and the action figure inside it whole!)

While a very well-made film in terms of technical sophistication, where The Lost World stumbles is in the writing department. Like the first one, it has more than its fair share of exciting sequences, but on the flip side, it has some pacing problems, particularly during the second act. Once again, it builds up to the characters' arriving on the island and encountering the dinosaurs but, once they do, the lapses in-between the action scenes become more noticeable and feel longer than they did before. I don't know what it is exactly but, when I watched the movie again recently, it felt

like it dragged a lot, especially the section immediately following the T-Rex attack on the trailers, where the groups join up to make the trek to the old operations building. It's a lot of dialogue and people walking and, even though I do enjoy a lot of these characters, I still found myself thinking, "Can we get back to the dinosaurs now?" I think part of the problem is that, already, the idea of dinosaurs having been brought back to life doesn't feel as special as before and thus, trying to do more scenes with them

in their natural habitat and keep them fresh, despite the change in scenery, is difficult. Speaking of which, many of the action scenes, as impressive and fun as they are, are much shorter than those in the first movie. Come to think of it, the only extended ones on the island are the roundup, the attack on the trailers, the Compies stalking and killing Dieter, and the scene with the Velociraptors at the compound, and those have very long spaces in-between them, with quicker scenes sprinkled in here and there, making the pace feel a bit choppy, 

Speaking of choppiness, as much as I enjoy the climax in San Diego with the T-Rex, it kind of hurts the story structure, as it now feels like you're watching something else entirely. After spending so much time on the island, with numerous characters, we're suddenly watching a monster-on-the-loose flick, with Malcolm, Sarah, and Ludlow being the only main characters remaining from the first two acts. Granted, this is hardly unprecedented, as The Lost World from 1925 and the various versions of the classic King Kong story have a similar structure to

this, but this feels tacked on, which was the case in reality, as Steven Spielberg came up with this third act just two months prior to shooting. It's also during this section of the movie where a major plothole occurs: the ship housing the T-Rex, the SS Venture (another nod to King Kong), crashes into the port of San Diego and, before the dinosaur gets loose, Ludlow, Malcolm, and Sarah, as well as a team of security guards, go onboard, looking for survivors. They find bodies everywhere, including a severed hand on the main wheel on the bridge, and someone else is found

dead, gripping the controls to the cargo hold. The implication is that the T-Rex got loose at some point and killed the crew, which is why the ship crashed into the port, but there are two major issues. One, he explodes out of the hold when someone stupidly opens it, so did he go back down there and close the doors himself after killing everyone? And two, how in the hell was he able to stick his big head through the doorway to the bridge without tearing it apart? Even David Koepp has admitted that this makes no sense,

and unlike the lapses of logic in the first film, I wondered about this even as a kid. I've heard that they originally planned for some Velociraptors to have gotten aboard the ship as well, but that idea was dropped, so I guess the answer is that this was just an oversight on the filmmakers' part.

As I mentioned before, another problem I have with the writing is the morality of some of the characters, particularly Nick Van Owen and how his sabotaging the InGen team tends to get people killed and screws over everyone else. I like that a lot of the characters are not painted in black-and-white, like Roland Tembo, and those shades of gray apply to many of the men under his command. Except for Dieter, none of them come off as particularly loathsome, and other than Ludlow, they aren't whooping and hollering obnoxiously during the roundup; rather, they just

come off as guys who are doing what they're being paid to do. At the same time, it's clear that what they're doing to the dinosaurs is both wrong and, given Ludlow's ultimate plan, irresponsible, so they need to be stopped. But the way Nick, and Sarah, as she assists him in letting loose the dinosaurs at the base-camp, go about it is really reckless and, in the long run, ends up doing more harm than good. That's especially true when Nick sabotages Tembo's rifle shells. Not only does it leave him unable to stop the

Tyrannosaurs when they invade the campsite, leading to a lot of people getting killed, be it by the female T-Rex at the waterfall or, in the case of those who run into the field of long grass, the Velociraptors, but it prompts him to take the male down with a tranquilizer dart, leading Ludlow to decide to take him and the infant to San Diego. In short, Nick unintentionally allows for the rampage there to happen in the first place! And except for Sarah when he first shows up with the baby T-Rex, no one ever calls him out for these really bad decisions, which I think could've made a bit of a difference and helped the film feel more nuanced.

In addition to its visual style, the film's darker tone is indicated by the larger number of human deaths, both onscreen and implied, as well as how much more terrifying and gruesome they tend to be. The film opens with young Cathy Bowman getting surrounded and attacked by a pack of Compies, and while we don't see what they ultimately did to her, she's supposedly fine, according to Hammond (honestly, I don't know how much I trust him on that). From there, you have moments like when poor Eddie gets pulled apart by the two Tyrannosaurs, Dieter is slowly

hunted and finally eaten alive by the Compies (their swarming him beforehand is disturbing in its own right), the people who get killed by the female T-Rex, including Carter getting stepped on and Robert Burke getting chomped outside the waterfall, the large group of people who fall victim to the Velociraptors, and all of the people who die onboard the Venture and in San Diego. Besides those we see onscreen, it's probable that the T-Rex kills that family whose backyard he wanders into (he definitely chomps on their dog), not

to mention all those who probably die as a result of the panic he causes in the streets, and when he smashes that big bus and sends it careening into the Blockbuster. And even though this is still a PG-13 movie, some of the imagery, like the blood flowing down the creek after Dieter is killed and the blood that pours down the waterfall when Burke bites it, complete with a nasty chomping sound, is pretty grisly.

Knowing exactly what audiences wanted, Steven Spielberg decided to up the ante on the number of dinosaurs, introducing new ones and bringing back some old favorites. I know I was one of those people looking forward to seeing some dinosaurs that were featured in the merchandising and video games for the first movie actually appear onscreen. Case in point, the first ones we see, right at the beginning, are the Compsognathus or Compies, which look like green, chicken-sized, lizards that walk on their hind legs. At first glance, they look harmless, with Burke telling Dieter that it's believed they're mainly scavengers, and one by itself even looks kind of cute, with the little squealing and chirping sounds they make. But, like the Dilophosaurus, appearances deceive, as they prove to be quite ferocious and deadly when they attack in large numbers, snarling and screaming all the while. And like the Velociraptors, they're very persistent when they're locked on to prey, as they relentlessly chase Dieter when he gets separated from the others, finally cornering and rending him to bits.

One type of dinosaur that people demanded be included this time was the Stegosaurus, and so, they appear very early on, as the first ones that Malcolm and his team come across when they arrive on the island. Like the Brachiosaurus in the first movie, they act as the only real source of wonder, as Eddie and Nick are absolutely awestruck at the sight of them. And Sarah is so caught up in it that she forgets that they're not supposed to interact with them, leading to the moment between her and the baby Stegosaurus. Speaking of which, that moment is dripping with that

typical Spielberg whimsy (again, the only major example in this film that I can think of) that some may roll their eyes at, but it's never bugged me, mainly because I'm a sentimental guy and the baby is pretty cute. Plus, it gets dropped fairly quickly when Sarah gets a bunch of adults angry at her when she accidentally scares the baby. In any case, the Stegosaurs look really good and, while they're not quite as big as some of the other dinosaurs, you get a real sense of their size when the group first comes across them as they walk through the forest.

Another dinosaur which, like the Compies, I first saw in the Jurassic Park Super NES game is the Pachycephalosaurus, or "head-butter," as it was nicknamed there. He doesn't get much screentime, with most of it being during the roundup scene, and that's a shame, because he could've been the center of some great action scenes. His most notable moment is when he demonstrates his significant headbutting ability when some of the mercenaries surround and attempt to snag him, sending one guy flying through a jeep's open right door and out the

other side. But right after that, the Pachy is caught by the Snagger, and you watch him struggle and scream as the arms come down around him and the airbags are deployed. When Nick releases all the dinosaurs being held at the InGen camp, you do see the Pachy chasing after some people, but most of the damage during that brief scene is done by a Triceratops, which makes its one and only appearance here in this sequence. Nick and Sarah also find a baby Triceratops in a cage, which was originally meant to appear in the

first movie but got cut. In fact, a good number of dinosaurs appear only in the roundup scene and the camp escape, including the Gallimimus from before, the Mamenchisaurus (basically just a renamed Brachiosaurus; they even used the same CG model), and a Parasaurolophus, which manages to lift several of the men trying to snare him up into the air, before they yank his foot out from under him and he falls hard to the ground.

Knowing that everyone would expect to see the T-Rex again, the filmmakers decided to double the fun and have two of them this time, with the male and female (I used to not be able to tell the difference between them, but I've learned the male has a throat waddle, and his eye ridges are a different color). Sarah's hypothesis that, contrary to popular belief, dinosaurs were nurturing parents is proven very true in their case, as they come for their infant when they realize he's been taken, then proceed to push the trailers over the cliff, feeling that it's now part of their territory.

They work together as a pair, as they both attack Eddie's car and share him as a meal, and later, while the male follows the scent of the baby's blood to the campsite and causes everyone to panic and run, the female comes in and chases a group of them into a cave behind a waterfall. And the male is the one that gets loose in San Diego, bursting with energy due to having been given a counteracting drug to the tranquilizer he was shot with, and ready to attack and munch on everything he comes across. But, like

before, his parental instincts kick in when he senses his baby, and follows Malcolm and Sarah back to the docks. There, when he finds Ludlow attempting to capture his baby down in the ship's cargo hold, the male not only prevents Ludlow from escaping but allows the baby to do the honors and kill him. And Malcolm and Sarah are then able to safely recapture and tranquilize him.

Speaking of the baby T-Rex, while an absolute marvel of practical effects, as a "character," he has little purpose other than to evoke sympathy, as he mostly just cries for his parents. But, that said, you'd have to be really cold-hearted to not feel something for him, as he sounds so pitiful (his cries were those of a baby camel that couldn't see where its mother was), especially when Tembo is using him as bait to lure out the male by chaining him to a stake in the ground, and having apparently broken his leg intentionally so he wouldn't struggle. Then, even though they're trying to help him, he gets taken by Nick and Sarah back to the trailers and is operated on, before finally being reunited with his parents. But, he and his father are abducted and taken to San Diego, with the baby being heavily sedated when Malcolm and Sarah find him at the amphitheater. He's then taken to lure his dad back to the ship, and there, he manages to get loose and, in the end, gets sweet revenge on Ludlow by personally killing him.

It was necessary that the Velociraptors make a return, although this is the film in the series where they get the least amount of focus. Like before, they don't make their first real appearance until pretty late but, this time, they feel like an afterthought. They only have a couple of scenes, the best of which is when they first appear, stalking and killing the men in the field of long grass, but, while they're still depicted as extremely deadly and persistent, they don't feel as big of a threat as they did before. There's no buildup to their appearance, as their presence is only mentioned once beforehand, when Ludlow says their nesting sites are something they'll have to try to avoid on the way to the compound, and even then, they come off as just another hazard in the team's way. Also, while their design is the same, I'm not big on the orange and white color scheme they have this time.

The Pteranodons were supposed to be the focus of the movie's original climax, with their attacking the chopper that rescues the main characters. But that, of course, got scrapped (for the better, in my opinion, as that sounded like a weak way to send the movie off), and they instead only appear at the very end, when one of them lands atop a tree and lets out this quite horrific screech. Fortunately, the filmmakers would make up for this by centering a major setpiece around them in Jurassic Park III.

Since Jurassic Park was the breakthrough film for its special effects, The Lost World's effects, despite also being nominated for an Oscar, often get overlooked, which is a shame, because the sequel takes what was established before and expands upon it ten-fold. Now that they had proved they could do it, the effects artists got a lot bolder with the digital dinosaurs, with many more shots of them than in the first movie, and they're just as convincing and awe-inspiring as before. What really helps sell them is that many of the major scenes take place at night, with the dinosaurs mostly

backlit. That's not to say that the daytime CGI sequences don't work, though, as the scene with the Stegosaurs and the roundup look amazing and almost completely photo-realistic, and the same goes for the final shot of the dinosaurs living peacefully on the island. There's a lot more interaction between the digital dinosaurs and live-action elements than there was before, like in the roundup and the climax, and I think they pulled that off really well, too. Now, inevitably, there are instances where the CGI does look a bit iffy, but most of it is still top notch. 

But even though the CGI is emphasized more here, like with the first movie, the effects hold up so well because they're accomplished through a combination of digital work and awesome animatronics courtesy of Stan Winston Studios, the latter of which are even more jaw-dropping. As amazing as the animatronics were previously, here they will totally have you believing that these are real, living, flesh-and-blood creatures. The two animatronic Tyrannosaurs come off just as awesome as the solo one before, and were even more difficult and potentially dangerous to work

with. They were so big and heavy that they had to be confined to one soundstage, with the sets for all of their scenes being built around them. But, on the flip side, they were able to be moved around the stage, like when you see them walking along with the characters outside the trailer. Also, while I may not care for the color scheme, the practical Velociraptors look great, although they're not used as much. And though they're often only used for single shots, like when they're in their cages at the InGen camp, the animatronic versions of the Stegosaurus (they were

going to use animatronics for the scene with the Stegosaurs and Sarah, but decided to go fully digital instead), the Triceratops, and the Pachycephalosaurus are awesome as well. But for me, the smaller creatures are all the more jaw-dropping. Those Compies, even when they're simple rubber puppets, look so lifelike, and so does that baby Stegosaurus. Like the Triceratops in the first film, it feels like Sarah is interacting with a real animal in that scene. But the most amazing one is the baby T-Rex. When

he's being carried around by the characters and operated on by Sarah and Nick, he looks like a real, frightened animal that's struggling and calling for his parents. Steven Spielberg himself was so impressed with the baby that he told Stan Winston that it, not the full-sized dinosaurs, was his masterpiece, and I'm not inclined to disagree with him. And apart from the dinosaur side of things, there's also some nice miniature work for when the ship crashes into the Port

of San Diego. Other than some not so great blue screen work here and there, the effects work is, like before, top notch. And like with the first one, re-watching The Lost World makes me wish that studios would go back to using both CGI and animatronics, rather than relying solely on the former.

Though it doesn't do anything special over the Universal logo, like the first film, The Lost World establishes an ominous mood as soon as it begins, with creepy sounds, some of which sound like growls, over a black screen. it opens on a shot of the ocean and pans up to reveal Isla Sorna, before cutting to the beach, with the sound of the rolling surf and the waves crashing against the rocks being the source of the "growling." The Bowman family are enjoying the day, with their yacht anchored just offshore, when

young Cathy walks off with a roast beef sandwich. Her father tells her mother, who's nagging her, to let her enjoy herself "for once," and assures her that there aren't any snakes to be found on the beach, as she worries. Cathy walks far down the beach and rounds a corner, eating her sandwich. She stops near a large bush at the edge of a patch of forest, when she hears a loud squeak and sees the bush rustle. To her surprise, a small Compsognathus hops out at her. Fascinated by the little creature, she gets down on her knees and

talks to it, as it hops towards her. Taking a piece of roast beef from her sandwich, she offers it to the Compy, and it gobbles it down. Cathy turns and yells for her parents to come and see what she's found, but when she turns back around, her smile fades, as she finds herself faced with a large group of Compies. Surrounding her, they prove to be quite aggressive, jumping at her, as well as screaming and growling. Back down the beach, her mother calls for her, saying that lunch is ready, while Cathy becomes frightened and tosses her sandwich to some of the Compie. However, the others continue threatening her, and down the beach, the others hear her screams. They all come running, and the scene ends with her mother screaming in horror at what she sees.

After that, following about fifteen or so minutes of set up, we get back to the island, with Dr. Ian Malcolm arriving with Nick Van Owen and Eddie Carr. Using a location sensor built into her satellite phone, they begin looking for Dr. Sarah Harding, the signal becoming stronger as they enter a clearing in the forest with a creek running through it. Finding Sarah's backpack on the ground, with holes in it, and her phone still in it, they begin calling for her. Eddie wanders off to another spot, and when joined by the

others, says that something big is approaching. That's when the Stegosaurus herd emerges from the forest and passes right in front of them, astonishing Nick and especially Eddie. They're startled when one walks right behind them as well, and Nick takes the opportunity to get some photos. He moves up to get a better shot, and comes across Sarah, who was nonchalantly photographing them as well. After meeting up with everybody, including Malcolm, and explaining that her pack, which she calls her "lucky

pack," naturally looks haggard, Sarah, borrowing Nick's Nikon camera, heads upstream to catch up with the Stegosaurs. Seeing them, she tells the guys to stay back, as she heads up there and, reaching the river bank, crawls along the ground. She comes upon a baby Stegosaurus as he's eating some ferns and, after taking his picture, gets up close, allows him to sniff her hand, then rubs his head. She goes for another picture, when the Nikon whirs loudly as it rewinds the film. This panics the baby and he moves away, and it also alerts the adults to her presence. One

comes in behind her, forcing her to run towards the others, while Nick has to hold Malcolm back to keep him from getting himself killed. Sarah ducks just in time to avoid one Stegosaur's spiked tail, only for the one behind her to charge. She runs and ducks inside of a hollow log, avoiding the spikes when the Stegosaurus slams them through it. Fortunately for her, the herd then moves off.

Not long afterward, following the discovery that Kelly stowed away, Peter Ludlow's team arrives on the island, with helicopters carrying in the vehicles. Once they touch down, they drive into a large clearing, and come upon groups of various types of dinosaurs. Riding in the one vehicle with Ludlow, Roland Tembo orders one of the motorcycles to flush a stray Pachycephalosaurus to the right. The motorcyclist drives into the midst of the dinosaurs, going right underneath and between both pairs of legs

of a Mamenchisaurus; the sight of this prompts Ludlow to laugh. As the Pachy is surrounded by a group of men attempting to snare him, Robert Burke and another man pull up and disembark from their vehicle. As they carefully approach, Burke explains the Pachy's devastating headbutting ability, right before the angry dinosaur knocks one man off his feet and sends another flying right through the inside of a vehicle. When he lets out an angry screech at them, Burke and the other man run off in a panic.

Meanwhile, Tembo drives up and radios the Snagger vehicle that the Pachy is heading in their direction. Coming up behind him, they manage to get a rope around his neck and he's shot with a tranquilizer dart. He immediately slows down, enabling the other men to put more ropes around his neck, as the Snagger's arms come down around him and deploy the airbags. Malcolm and his group covertly watch the roundup from a ridge, while Tembo orders Dieter to take on a Parasaurolophus among the herd. Sitting in the vehicle being driven by Carter, Dieter deploys his

extendable seat and manages to shoot the dinosaur with a tranquilizer dart. He slows down in front of them, as men surround and prepare to snare him. While he does manage to lift two men who get ropes around his neck up into the air, he falls to the ground when one of his legs is jerked out from under him.

Following the roundup, Tembo and Ajay find a large track in the mud, which Burke confirms is that of a Tyrannosaurus. Tembo loads up his double-barrel shotgun and heads out, along with Ajay, to collect his "fee." After the moment where Dieter makes his fateful decision to shock a Compy with his cattle-prod for no reason, Tembo and Ajay come upon the Rex nest. Seeing the infant in the center, as he munches on the remains of one of his parents' meals, Tembo deduces that, being as young as he is, his parents will

return shortly. He decides to lure the male out into the open, and in the next scene, they have the infant chained to a stake in the ground, howling in pain and fear. Meanwhile, the two of them are set up in a nearby tree, waiting for the adults to arrive. Elsewhere, the others have set up their large base-camp, unaware that they're being spied on by Malcolm's group. While Ludlow gives a presentation to possible partners via a satellite linkup, Nick and Sarah sneak into the camp and begin setting the

captured dinosaurs free. They start with an adult Stegosaurus, then go on to a baby Triceratops, the Pachycephalosaurus, the baby Stegosaurus, and finally, an adult Triceratops. Right in the middle of Ludlow's presentation, the latter charges into his tent, sending everyone fleeing, while other dinosaurs run wild, with some chasing their captors. There's a huge explosion and a burning piece of wreckage is sent flying into the air, right at the tree where Tembo and Ajay are set up. They quickly jump down and run for

cover just before it smashes into the top of the tree. In the midst of the chaos, Nick comes upon the baby T-Rex and opts to help him. He rejoins Sarah with the baby nearby and they drive off with him, despite Sarah's protests. At the camp, Dieter finds and shows Tembo the broken padlock to one cage, and he realizes that they've been sabotaged.

As they're on their way back to the trailer with the baby, they pass by Eddie as he's installing his high hide. The sound of the baby's wailing makes him stop in his tracks and ask, "What the hell was that?" When they arrive and bring the baby inside the trailer, Malcolm, naturally, protests. But there's little he can do, as they put the baby down on the examination table and prepare to do what they can. Nick has to take his belt off and use it as a makeshift muzzle, as the baby snaps at him, while Sarah is able to pinpoint

the fracture in his leg with an x-ray machine. While they surmise how bad the damage is, Kelly begins to panic, realizing that the baby's cries are going to attract attention. She frantically tells her dad that she wants to leave, then says she wants to be somewhere high up. Thus, in the next scene, Malcolm takes her to the high hide with Eddie. They lift the platform up into the treetops and Malcolm tries to calm Kelly down, but she's not buying it, given the stories he told her about what happened on Isla Nublar. He tells her,

"This is nothing like that. We're in a completely different situation now," when they hear the unmistakable sound of a T-Rex roaring nearby. Malcolm asks Eddie if he can get in touch with the trailer but, when he calls, Sarah and Nick are so deep into the operation that they ignore the phone. Malcolm is then forced to repel down to the ground and run to the trailer. Before he leaves, he tells Kelly that he's coming right back, adding, "I give you my word." Kelly counters, "But you never keep your word!", and Malcolm, having no response to that,

repels down, going a little too fast and breaking a bunch of branches on the way. Back at the trailer, Nick and Sarah are finishing up, when Sarah says she needs an adhesive for the cast. She tells Nick to spit and he gives her a big wad of saliva. Disgusted, she exclaims, "Your gum!", and wipes the spit on his vest, while he gives her his chewing gum. At the high hide, Kelly and Eddie watch as something enormous moves through the forest below them, heading in the direction of the trailer.

Malcolm reaches the trailer and rushes inside, as Eddie calls to warn them but they, like before, ignore it. He runs to the table, saying he needs to get the baby out of there, while Sarah and Nick say they just set the leg. But they're out of time, as the parked vehicle outside is suddenly hurled past the window in a wrecked heap. Malcolm comments, "Mommy's very angry," and they both look out the windows ahead of them, when an enormous head appears outside the one directly behind them. The one T-Rex snarls,

getting their attention, when the other appears on the opposite side, snarling as well. As they realize they're surrounded, Sarah screams when the male lets out a ferocious roar and nudges the side of the trailer. Noticing that both of them are looking at the baby, as he drowsily moves his head and lets out muffled groans. Sarah realizes that, as she theorized, they came for their baby, and Malcolm opts that they give him to them. They pick him up, with Nick removing the muzzle, and carry him over to the door, with the

adults following them. They open the door, with the male standing right outside, and put the baby down. He walks towards his dad, while the humans duck back inside the trailer. The phone immediately rings and Malcolm picks it up; it's Eddie, telling them that the Rexes are leaving. Malcolm then talks with Kelly, reassuring her that he's going to be right back, and hangs up. He goes to use the radio again, when he realizes something and mutters, "Hang on. This is gonna be bad." Suddenly, the trailer is violently knocked over onto its side, then upside down.

Hearing the sound of a T-Rex roaring, he looks out the window and realizes that they're being pushed over the edge of the cliff. The Tyrannosaurs smash through the front trailer's windshield and push both closer to the cliff. Malcolm and Nick try to get the door open but it's jammed from the force of the first impact. Knowing there's no escape, they all hang onto something, when the rear trailer goes completely over the cliff and dangles in midair. The cabinet lid that Sarah is hanging onto falls open and causes her to lose her grip, sending her falling onto the trailer's rear window.

Fortunately, the glass doesn't break, but as she lies there, she hears it creaking and realizes it's slowly cracking, forcing her to be careful about how much weight she puts on the pressure points. Malcolm starts climbing down towards her, while Nick climbs down and reaches for the satellite phone, as its strap slowly slips across a light that it's hanging on. Just as Malcolm climbs down to where he's right above Sarah and tells her to reach for his hand, the phone slips off and falls towards them. Just as Nick yells,

"Heads up!", Malcolm grabs Sarah's lucky pack, which she's also holding onto. The window breaks and, within seconds, the pack is all that's keeping her from falling to her death. Up above, Eddie drives to the spot, while Malcolm manages to pull Sarah up to where he and Nick are. Coming across the scene, Eddie gets out of the car and climbs inside the other trailer that's still on the cliff. Telling Malcolm that Kelly's safe in the high hide, he asks them what they need and they agree that they need rope. Climbing

back outside in the rain, Eddie runs to the car, grabs a rope from the back, ties one end to a nearby tree stump, and carries the rest of it through the one trailer and tosses it down to the others. But just when they grab it, the situation is further complicated when the trailer that's still atop the cliff begins slowly losing its traction in the wet mud and the weight of the other drags it towards the edge. Eddie pulls a hook and cable out of the front of his car and drags it back towards the trailer. It snags just before he reaches the trailer, causing him to fall. On top of that, as the one

trailer inches towards the cliff, it slowly pulls the knot loose on the rope. It gives just as the trio are climbing, sending them falling and forcing them to grab the edges of the smashed window below them. Eddie pulls the hook and cable out more forcefully to avoid it snagging again and, just as the trailer's front tires go over the edge of the cliff, he manages to attach the hook around its rear fender. That done, he takes the rope and reties the knot around the stump... only to see that now his car is getting pulled by the trailer! As the trailer's back end lifts up into the air, he

gets into the car, throws it in reverse, and floors it. Once again, the wet mud makes the task even harder than it already is, as the car goes back and forth in place. However, Eddie manages to pull the trailer partially back over the edge, while inside, as the others climb up, Sarah, at the top, slips and slides back down, knocking all three of them back outside the rear window.

Just when you think the situation couldn't get any worse, Eddie hears an all-too familiar booming sound and, sure enough, the Tyrannosaurs emerge from the forest behind him. Spotting him inside the car, the male tears the roof off with his jaws, then leans in and knocks the left door off. Eddie manages to dodge him and continues to rev the motor, as the dinosaurs destroy the vehicle around him, ripping out the seat and activating the airbag from the steering wheel. He desperately tries to grab his rifle, armed with the

powerful tranquilizer, but the tip of its barrel is snagged in some netting. The male then leans down, grabs Eddie, and pulls him up into the air by the leg. He flips Eddie in midair, the male grabbing his front, female his legs, and they pull and rip him in half like a wishbone. With that, both trailers fall completely over the edge of the cliff, taking Eddie's car with them. Malcolm, Sarah, and Nick hang onto the rope as the interiors of the trailers rushes past them, before they crash down on the rocks below in a massive explosion. Once they get a hold of themselves, they

climb their way back up the cliff, and find some unexpected help up above, as the InGen team lend them a hand and pull them up over the edge. There, Malcolm is reunited with Kelly, whom they retrieved from the high hide.

After the groups join up and walk all through the night, they stop in one spot to take a break for five minutes. Dieter then goes off to relieve himself in the woods. He passes by Carter, telling him to wait for him, but unbeknownst to him, Carter is listening to music on his Walkman and didn't hear him. Finding a spot, he prepares to do his business, when an unexpected sound startles him. Brandishing an assault rifle, he searches around for the source of it. When he looks straight ahead at a nestle of ferns, he's startled when a Compy sticks its head out and snarls at him.

After jumping, he laughs at the sight of it, then takes out his cattle-prod and chases it around, attempting to zap it. The Compy evades him and runs off, and Dieter heads back to rejoin the group. However, he realizes that he's gotten turned around and walks about, yelling for Carter to make some noise so he knows where he is. Carter, however, is still completely oblivious, listening to his music. Dieter walks along the trail, when he takes a very bad step off to the left and tumbles down a steep hillside, losing his rifle in the process. After a very rough slide

down, he hits the bottom just as hard. And after a few seconds of laying there, a large group of Compies come at him from all sides and swarm all over him. He stands up, yelling in pain as they bite him, with one clamping down on his upper lip, and attempts to rip them off. He yanks off the one biting his lip and, with that, manages to get them to jump off him. They run just a few feet away, then stand and look at him, hopping and making cutesy sounds, as if mocking him. Dieter turns and starts down a creek, only to turn

and see the Compies following him. He runs and yells at them, throwing a rock for good measure, prompting them to scatter and disappear into the foliage. Satisfied, and cursing in Swedish under his breath, he continues upstream, yelling for Tembo. Meanwhile, Tembo tells the group that they need to move on. As everyone gets up and moves out, Carter is so off in his own world that it takes another man tossing something at him to get his attention. He joins the others, not noticing Dieter's backpack lying nearby.

Elsewhere, Dieter is wandering up the creek, as the Compies, who are no longer intimidated by him or his threats, relentlessly follow him. He stumbles and falls in the shallow water, and another group of Compies come down the riverbank to his left. One hops on his back, followed by several others, which begin biting at him again, as those that were chasing him catch up. He gets to his feet and stumbles ahead, but then turns and sees that there are dozens of them, waiting to attack. Turning around, he crawls across the top of a large log, but as soon as he gets on the other side, the

Compies hop across and swarm him offscreen. His screams of pain quickly die down and all that remains is their chirping, as the camera pans over and shows his blood running down the stream. By this point, Tembo has realized that Dieter is missing and goes off to look for him with Carter and another man. He tells the others to continue on until they reach the ridge.

By nightfall, they've set up camp, and Tembo returns, telling Malcolm and Ajay that he and the others found very little left of Dieter. After talking with him, Malcolm heads towards the tent where Sarah and Kelly are sleeping, when he hears a very familiar rumbling, and sees the sporadic puddles of water around the campsite rippling from it. In the tent, Sarah awakens upon hearing the increasingly louder sound and looks up at her shirt, which she has hanging on a line above her, and realizes one of the Tyrannosaurs can smell the infant's blood on it.

Putting away some candy wrappers, she turns off the lantern, leading to a creepy shot of the T-Rex's head silhouetted outside the tent. Malcolm watches helplessly from nearby as the dinosaur sticks his head inside the tent, sniffing the shirt, and then sniffs at Sarah, who shudders in fear. Even worse, Kelly wakes up and turns her head to look. She starts to scream but Sarah puts her hand over her mouth and shushes her. They both try to be absolutely still and quiet, though Kelly is crying out of fear. Outside, Carter wakes up, sees the T-Rex, and screams, waking everyone else up

and causing them to panic when they also see him. They all run for it, ignoring Malcolm telling them to stay still, as the T-Rex raises up, with the tent on his head, and flings it off with an angry roar. Sarah and Kelly join up with Nick, while Malcolm gets separated in the chaos. Tembo comes in with his rifle, just as the female T-Rex joins her mate (the VHS I had for years was full-screen, so I could never make out the female coming in from the left, or which one chased the others and which stayed at the site). He

goes for a shot, only for his gun to click empty. As the female chases after a large group, he realizes that Nick sabotaged his shells. With the female right behind them, the group run for their lives, but Carter falls and gets trampled by them, and is then promptly stepped on by the T-Rex, sticking to the underside of her foot for several steps before he's dislodged. 

Back at the campsite, Tembo loads a dart into the tranquilizer gun and then, carrying another in his mouth, walks over to the spot where the male is still milling around the deserted campsite. He hides behind some foliage and takes a shot, managing to score a hit. The T-Rex turns and roars at him, as he loads the other dart. Meanwhile, Sarah, Nick, Kelly, and Burke get separated from everyone else being chased by the female and run towards a waterfall, taking cover in a small cave behind it. The female sticks her enormous head inside, roaring and

chomping at them, but they're just beyond her reach. She licks at them, her tongue managing to touch Sarah, when Burke panics upon realizing that a snake slithered down into his shirt. He gets within biting range and she grabs his arm, hauls him up out of the cave, and after a loud, nasty crunch, his blood pours down with the water. Horrified at this, everyone tries to get a hold of themselves, when they hear what sounds like the T-Rex coming back. Instead, it turns out to be Malcolm, who runs through the water and rejoins them. Elsewhere, the others run out of the

jungle and enter a large field of very tall grass. Trailing behind them, Ajay yells for them not to go in there, and the reason why shows itself, as a pair of Velociraptors watch from nearby. Promptly, we get that great overhead shot of the raptors closing in on their prey from all sides, followed by several men getting yanked down one at a time. Realizing they're being attacked, the others scatter in a panic, with one man turning and screaming as a raptor jumps up into the air and lands on him from a great distance.

Malcolm, Sarah, Nick, and Kelly then enter the field, following the trails in the grass that the others left, when Nick comes upon Ajay's bag. They then hear the sound of the men and raptors screaming nearby, and Malcolm stops when he hears the sound of one growling, as well as the grass rustling nearby. Realizing they're very close, Malcolm quietly tells the others to go as fast as they can.

The four of them book it through the field and run to the edge, only to slip down a slope and land in a dinosaur boneyard. They quickly get up and start moving, only for Malcolm to have stop and sit down, as he hurt his leg (again). Looking up ahead, Nick sees the operations building and opts to go on and radio for help. Sarah tells him to wait but he doesn't, saying that every second counts. He runs ahead and enters the building, then searches for the communications room. Once inside, he throws a switch, managing to get the power running again, and

after clearing out some overgrowth covering the computer monitors and radio, he's able to use to contact InGen, telling them of the situation and giving them the coordinates. Then, a quick cut back to the camp shows that Ludlow is utterly astonished at what Tembo, who's sitting calmly nearby, has managed to accomplish.

Malcolm, Sarah, and Kelly enter the compound and make their way through the worker village, towards the operations building. Suddenly, when Sarah walks by a vehicle, a Velociraptor jumps up onto its roof and then on her back. Once again, her lucky pack saves her life, as the raptor digs into it, ripping it off her back and allowing her to run for it. She rejoins Malcolm and Kelly, and they try to find a way around the raptor, when he loses interest in the pack and focuses on them. Malcolm diverts him away from Sarah and Kelly, telling them to get inside

somewhere. Two more raptors show up and Sarah and Kelly take cover in a tool-shed. As those two are focused on getting at the girls, the other chases Malcolm to a nearby building. He goes through the door and closes it, only for the raptor to crash through the window. Malcolm runs back outside but the raptor cuts him off, forcing him back in. There, he rips the weak door off its hinges and uses it as a shield, but the raptor lunges at him and sends him crashing through a window behind him. He scrambles to his feet and takes cover in a nearby truck, as the raptor

chases him over to it. While the other two raptors begin digging underneath the tool-shed door, the third manages to gradually force his snout through the truck's passenger side window. In the shed, Sarah and Kelly frantically dig beneath the edge of the back wall, though the raptors prove to be much faster at this. Eventually, the girls dig enough of a space for them to crawl under the loose boards, and Sarah tries to get Kelly to go. But just as she does, one of the raptors comes around and sticks his head through the

opening. The girls quickly climb up to the shed's rafters, as the raptor attempts to force his way in. Outside, the other raptor has managed to smash his way through the window to get at Malcolm. However, seeing that the door to the tool shed is clear, he gets out of the truck and runs for it. Though he manages to get inside, he's then faced with the raptor who's almost dug his way under the shed's wall. Malcolm quickly climbs up to join the girls, as the raptor manages to get in. He jumps at Malcolm but misses,

and searches for another way to get at him. This is when Kelly jumps onto a bar hanging across the shed's ceiling, just as the raptor manages to jump up onto the scaffolding where Malcolm is and corner him. As he goes in for the kill, Kelly yells, "Hey, you!", and the raptor actually turns to look! She then swings at him and knocks him through some wooden paneling behind him. He's impaled on the shrapnel outside, while Kelly drops down to the floor.

Malcolm joins his daughter, when they hear another raptor coming through the hole under the wall and run out. Sarah, meanwhile, climbs up onto the shed's roof, takes a running jump across it, and lands on another building. The raptor quickly follows her up there and jumps to the other roof, landing just a few feet in front of her. Screaming, Sarah loses her grip and slides across the paneling on the roof. She nearly falls over the edge, where the last raptor is waiting down below. She tosses bits of the paneling down at him, as the one on the roof slides across it as they paneling

comes loose beneath his feet. She removes more and more of the panels, until he slips off and falls on the other below. The two of them immediately get into a fight over this and Sarah tries to climb back up onto the roof, only to slip and fall down next to them. Fortunately, they're too busy fighting to pay attention to her, and the fight even turns downright deadly, as they start going for the throat. Sarah takes the opportunity to crawl away, falling through a hole, landing in another room, and tumbling out the

window. Malcolm and Kelly help her to her feet and they run for the operations building, as a rescue helicopter is landing behind it. Reaching it, and rejoining with Nick, they climb aboard and are lifted off to safety. Unbeknownst to them, Ludlow already has the tranquilized male T-Rex ready to be transported to San Diego, and orders for the infant to be found as well. After Tembo refuses his offer to come work for him at the San Diego facility, Sarah, up in the helicopter, sees what's happening down below and opens the door. She points it out to Malcolm and Nick, while down on the ground, Ludlow looks up at them...

...and it then cuts to the city of San Diego where, at the port, Ludlow is holding a ceremony to christen the opening of his park with the arrival of the T-Rex. Malcolm and Sarah also arrive but the security guard doesn't allow them inside and slowly closes the gate. At his podium, Ludlow notices them, but goes on with his speach, when the harbormaster comes out and tells him that the ship is already here. Ludlow goes to join him in the control room, telling one of the security guards to let Malcolm and Sarah in. The harbormaster shows Ludlow the ship's transponder

signal on a computer monitor, as it's coming in fast and he can't contact them. Ludlow tells him to try again and he does, asking them to reduce their speed, but he gets no response. Outside, Malcolm and Sarah are escorted inside the gate, when a low rumbling in the distance gets everyone's attention. The ship fails to respond to multiple requests to reduce its speed, while Malcolm, hearing the sound, comments, "We should've stayed in the damn car." The rumbling grows louder, and nothing but static comes over the radio, as the ship gets closer and closer to the dock.

Ludlow walks outside and looks out towards the sea, when the ship emerges from the fog, heading right for the dock. Everyone runs for it as the ship plows through several yards of the port, destroying everything in its path, before coming to a stop. Once everything settles down, Ludlow and numerous members of his security force, as well as Malcolm and Sarah, board the ship. Finding the main deck in tatters, one guard climbs up to the bridge, where he finds what's left of much of the crew. Back out on

deck, Malcolm and Sarah notice that the doors to the cargo hold are whirring loudly, and Malcolm finds a body with a death grip on the controls. Ludlow yells for his men to check the hold for survivors, but Malcolm yells for everyone to get off the ship. One man finds the control and pries it loose from the body's grip. Malcolm tries to stop him from pressing it, but it's too late, as the male T-Rex bursts out of the hold. While Ludlow watches from the bridge, the dinosaur walks down off the ship and onto the dock,

chomping at two men who jump into the water. He makes his way out of the port and steps up onto a ridge, roaring at the city skyline. Meanwhile, Malcolm and Sarah, realizing the state the T-Rex is in, and that Ludlow brought the infant as well, figure out the best way to get him back to the ship.

The T-Rex wanders into a suburban neighborhood and, spotting a swimming pool in a backyard, heads towards it. His footsteps awaken a young boy named Benjamin in the house, and he sits up in bed, turns, and looks out the window to see the dinosaur's growling face. Shockingly calm about this, he gets out of bed and walks out the door and down the hall, to his parents' bedroom. Outside, their dog, who's chained to his doghouse, barks at the T-Rex, as he laps up some of the pool water. He even pulls his doghouse along the ground with him to get closer, but

when the dinosaur turns and growls at him, the dog retreats back into his house. Benjamin wakes his exhausted parents up, claiming, "There's a dinosaur in our backyard," and motions them back towards his room, as they argue about why he saw what he saw. Once in his room, they both look out the window and are shocked to see the T-Rex... with the doghouse hanging from his mouth. He drops the house, shattering it on the ground, when Benjamin grabs a camera and takes a picture. The T-Rex turns and roars

at the sudden bright light, as Benjamin's parents scream. Elsewhere, Malcolm and Sarah arrive at the Jurassic Park amphitheater, where the infant is contained, and after crashing through the security checkpoint, drive into the center of the place. There, they find the infant inside a cage, muzzled and heavily sedated. They get him in the car and back out of it, preparing to search for the adult.

He proves to not be hard to find, as he's currently wreaking havoc downtown, sending people running and driving backwards in a panic, causing accidents, and munching on a traffic light. He chases after a large tour bus and attempts to topple it over by slamming into its side, sending people and objects flying out the windows on the other side, and causing the bus to crash into a Blockbuster Video. He chases after more people, managing to corner and grab one man in his jaws (incidentally, David Koepp best not quit his day job, as his dying sounds here are really

over-the-top and cartoonish), and when Malcolm and Sarah come upon the mayhem, they drive over to a gas station down the street from the t-Rex. At first, it seems like they're not going to be able to get his attention, as the infant is too drugged to call for him. But then, he catches his baby's scent and turns and roars at them. knocking over a Union 76 ball that rolls past their car. They pop the car in reverse and turn around, with the T-Rex now right behind them. A big squadron of police cars, and an animal control

vehicle, come upon the chase, but when the T-Rex stops and roars at them, they panic and quickly go back the way they came. By this point, the infant is awake enough to call for his father, while Malcolm improvises a way back to the waterfront by driving through the wall of a warehouse. Stopping the car, Malcolm gets out, takes the infant, and he and Sarah run for it, as the T-Rex plows through the wall behind their car. They run for the water, while nearby, in his

car, Ludlow orders that the adult be shot, but the baby left alive. At that moment, they run by him with the baby, and he gets out and follows them down to the spot where the ship crashed into the dock (he walks in such a sissy manner down the slope, I might add). He follows them up onto the deck, loses sight of them for a second, then watches as they jump over the side and into the water.

Hearing the baby wailing down in the cargo hold, Ludlow makes his way down there. At the bottom, he finds that the baby ripped his muzzle off, then sees him on the other side of a fence, growling at him. Crawling through the hole he ripped in it, he chases the baby amid some boxes, attempting to corner him, unaware that the adult has followed the trail to the hold as well. The baby runs past Ludlow and towards his parent, who sets his sights on Ludlow. Ludlow tries to escape around the edge of the room, using various objects as cover, before making a break for it.

However, the T-Rex grabs him by the leg and swings him back over, dumping him onto the floor. Ludlow gets back up and tries to run, but stumbles and falls again. That's when, with some urging from his dad, the baby runs after and jumps on Ludlow, killing him as his dad watches proudly. Outside, the police and a helicopter with a sniper arrive, but Malcolm and Sarah climb back onto the ship, the latter now armed with a tranquilizer rifle. Malcolm hits the controls to the cargo hold doors and they slowly close on top of the T-Rex. Then, up near the bridge, Sarah loads a dart, aims the rifle, and fires before the man in the chopper can take a shot. The dart hits the T-Rex in the side of his neck, as the hold's doors close completely.

The finale has Malcolm and Sarah, having now come down from the adrenaline rush they've been on for so long, asleep on the couch (it's not clear whose home this is). Meanwhile, Kelly watches CNN coverage of the transportation of the T-Rex and the infant back to Isla Sorna on the TV. After showing aerial footage of the ship and its Navy escort, it cuts to an interview done earlier with John Hammond: "It is absolutely imperative that we work with the Costa Rican Department of Biological Preserves to establish a set of rules for the preservation, and isolation, of that

island. 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." And with that, it cuts to the final shot, of the dinosaurs living peacefully on the island, with the Tyrannosaurs raising their baby, a herd of Stegosaurs moving along nearby, and a Pteranodon landing on a tree.

I used to really rag on the score that John Williams came up with here, as it makes very little use of the classic themes from the original, including the main theme, which is heard sporadically and mostly in subdued form, with the actual full-blown piece being saved for the ending credits. Nowadays, however, I can't believe I ever thought that, as this score is awesome and one of the movie's strongest assets. Not only does it fit better with the tone and setting, but I also respect Williams for deciding to do something different for the sequel. In fact, Steven Spielberg has said he prefers this score to the first one, and while I don't agree with that, it's still great music. It goes for a more adventurous, action-oriented feel, as opposed to the sense of wonder and suspense of the first. That said, though, like with the first, Williams opens the score with a very low, foreboding piece that hints very much at the island's nature, that this is a place where the dinosaurs roam free and there's nowhere safe for any human who goes there. For the new main theme, which you first hear when the research team departs, and is also heard during the roundup, when the two teams trek across the island, when the T-Rex is recaptured at the end, and during the ending credits, Williams came up with a rather upbeat, exciting, driving sound that's perfectly suited for an expedition into a forbidding place and reinforces that this is an adventure. In fact, some of the music is very reminiscent of Max Steiner's score for King Kong, particularly the music that plays when the men run into the long grass. The music also often plays up the setting in a classic manner, with a lot of percussive, tribal-sounding drums, which are orchestrated to either be tense and exciting, or atmospheric. Some of my favorite parts of the score accentuate the chaos and terror of the dinosaurs attacks, such as the trailer scene, the Rexes ambushing the campsite, and the battle against the Velociraptors at the compound.

Whenever the original Jurassic Park theme is used, it has some significant resonance, like when Malcolm leaves Hammond's estate to head to Isla Sorna, and most poignantly, in a distant, faint version when Nick finds the mural of the park in the operations building, getting across the idea of how Hammond's dream wasn't to be. There's also an altered version for when we see the amphitheater, suggesting that this park would've been completely different from what Hammond had in mind, given Ludlow's mindset. Notably, when we see Hammond on the TV at the end, we hear a soft piano version of that really beautiful theme from the first movie, which, in retrospect, fits in a sad way, as this is the last time we would ever see him onscreen. And finally, with the dinosaurs now able to live their lives without any interference, we hear the theme in all of its spectacular glory.

At the end of the day, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a prime example of the typical sequel that's inferior to its parent. It doesn't have the sense of wonder and awe that the first movie did, going for more of a typical monster/survival movie, and it also doesn't have the same fluid pace, with fairly long lapses in-between the action scenes. Its structure is also a bit choppy, with the climax feeling as tacked on as it actually was, and some of the characters do some morally questionable, as well as dumb, things But, that said, I do cut the movie some slack since Jurassic Park was a tough act to follow and also because it does have a lot of strengths, like a bunch of memorable characters, great locations and cinematography, well-done and exciting action sequences, CGI and animatronic effects that are still jaw-dropping and build upon the groundbreaking work from the first movie, and an adventurous, thrlling, and sometimes foreboding music score. Like all of the other entries in this franchises, The Lost World will always be in the first's shadow, but while may be less of a classic, I do think that it's worthwhile. If nothing else, it works perfectly fine, for the most part, as an adventure with a monster movie motif.