The Quarantine Stream: ‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’ Is A Reminder That Everyone, Even Steven Spielberg, Makes Mistakes
By Jacob Hall/Sept. 6, 2020 9:00 am EST
Loosely (and I mean loosely) based on author Michael Crichton’s sequel novel, The Lost World reeks of another sub-par Spielberg sequel: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Like that film, The Lost World transforms intelligent characters into bumbling idiots. Like that film, The Lost World increases the volume and the chaos while dialing back the mystery and the awe. Like that film, The Lost World replaces excitement with violence and cruelty. Both films represent Spielberg doubling down on what seemingly made the previous film work, only to realize that too much of any ingredient spoils the recipe.
Still, even the worst Spielberg movies have their moments. A sequence where a trailer hangs over a cliff is thrilling stuff. The first major dinosaur sequence of the movie, where a family of stegosauruses cross a river, comes reasonably close to capturing the wonder of the first movie. But it’s hard to linger on those moments when so much surrounding them is just so…ugly. I can’t shake the sequence where Peter Stormare’s mercenary is slooowly killed by tiny dinos, because it goes on for so long while literally adding nothing to the film. Of course, it all climaxes in a San Diego-set third act that goes off the rails with such ferocity that it makes the sins of any other Spielberg move feel tame by comparison (“Nuking the fridge” has nothing on “t-rex in San Diego”).
Still, The Lost World is never as unnecessarily cruel and unpleasant as Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which may be the worst major film release of the past decade. So it has that going for it. But it stands now as a telling reminder of what happens when a genius gets bored, of when a sure-thing proves to be anything but. How can we treasure the actual great movies when we don’t have the disappointments to measure them against?
