T. rex redux

The Lost World clones Jurassic Park

by Peter Keough

Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by David Koepp based on the novel The Lost World, by Michael Crichton. With Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Richard Attenborough, Vanessa Lee Chester, Vince Vaughan, and Richard Schiff. At the Harbour Mall, Lincoln Mall, Narragansett, Showcase, Starcase, Tri-Boro, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.

"First come the oohs and aahs. Then it's the running and screaming." That's how chaos theoretician Dr. Ian Malcolm, played with weird and sardonic elan by Jeff Goldblum, describes how people react to the DNA-regenerated dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He might well have been summing up the movie itself and its predecessor. The sheer awe of watching herds of stegasauruses re-created by computer effects gives way to the visceral thrills of T. rexes and raptors stalking, chasing, and devouring their hapless human prey. It's a simple formula augmented by the most advanced cinema technology to satisfy the most primitive and most rapidly jaded of movie appetites.

In the process, however, something doesn't survive. Even more so than in the original movie, plot, plausibility, and character are secondary to spectacle. Not only is the premise devoid of any ingenuity, it ignores the teasing hints of the grounds for a sequel offered in the first film. Four years after his plans for a dinosaur amusement park on a tropical island have fallen apart, ditzy mogul John Hammond (a sanctimonious Richard Attenborough) summons Dr. Malcolm, one of the survivors of the initial mission, and informs him that there just happens to be another island, site B, where dinosaurs have been secretly living in a quarantined natural environment. A team of four volunteers is being sent to do unintrusive research in order to "redeem" the previous disaster by studying the prehistoric beasts and provide a boost in knowledge about prehistoric life.

Malcolm, who seems to serve as the voice of common sense despite his chaotic inclinations, takes exception to Hammond's insistent wrongheadedness but agrees to go when he learns that his paleontologist girlfriend, Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore, looking desperately in need of Chekhov), is part of the team. In an effort to make the film seem more character-driven, Spielberg injects much gratuitous persiflage about "relationships" and tries to give the illusion of depth by overlapping the dialogue Robert Altman-style. In addition to the endangered and often carping girlfriend, Malcolm is given an endangered and whiny daughter. Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), who is inexplicably black, stows away on the mission in order to accuse dad of "never keeping his word" -- at the height of a T. rex attack.

Fortunately such nonsense is abandoned for the nonsense everyone has paid to see. Despite her avowed dedication to avoiding all interaction with the habitat, the maternally inclined Sarah just can't resist tickling the nose of an E.T.-like baby Steg, or nursing a Tyrannosaurus infant with a broken leg and thoughtlessly wearing a blouse stained with its blood. Such irritating stupidity is compounded when an army of hunters led by Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), Hammond's venal successor, and big-game hunter Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite adrift in a role that's a meaningless pastiche even by the standards of this genre) set out to capture the dinos for a zoo. And then the fun and games begin, as the would-be hunters prove mere fast food for the lizards. Although armed like Rambos, they don't fire a shot -- apparently not a single computer-generated animal was injured in the making of this movie.

The one-sidedness grows numbing; worse, the stunts and effects are already stale. How many times can Spielberg get away with that rumble-of-distant-footsteps-and-rippling-water effect? There are some amazing moments -- yet the most exciting sequence barely involves dinosaurs at all, rather the basic elements of a cliff, a suspended vehicle, and a slowly cracking pane of glass. To give the beasts their due, they provide some surreal and visionary moments, as when a Tyrannosaurus strolls through the backyards of a San Diego suburb, a sequence that ends with a sight gag that will offend dog lovers but warm the hearts of those for whom the film's black humor is its most intriguing effect.

That humor comes partly from Goldblum, who having seen it all before makes grimly hilarious ironic asides that predict the inevitable. Of course, we've all seen it before, not just in Jurassic Park but in King Kong, Godzilla (both of which Spielberg comically alludes to), and the 1925 silent adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World -- which Michael Crichton's novel shamelessly plagiarizes. And undoubtedly we will see it all again, as this second outing of the Jurassic Park franchise furthers the extinction of any films that are not an amusement-park ride.