The Lost World: Jurassic Park
With Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vanessa Lee Chester, Vince Vaughn, Arliss Howard, and Pete Postlethwaite.
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Here director Steven Spielberg reprises the endearing preoccupation with good parenting he showed in Jaws, Poltergeist, The Color Purple, and Schindler’s List, which all revolve around endangered children. The heartbeat that animates The Lost World is family values, which are typically represented at mealtime. The film opens with an outlandishly wealthy English family enjoying a white-linen picnic on a jungle isle. As the parents are bickering over whether to allow their daughter to roam the beach, she scampers off and encounters a wilding gang of Procompsognathus triassicus, leaping birdlike critters with claws like Freddy Krueger. Screams ensue.
In another scene of family disarray, a mom and dad blame each other for their son’s delusional streak when he rousts them from their suburban slumber to report a dinosaur in the backyard. The towering Tyrannosaurus rex, the spawn of greedy biogenetic engineers, takes their swimming pool for a watering hole–and their pooch for a snack. No figment of the boy’s imagination, this wayward creature is rampaging across San Diego in search of its baby, of course, which was kidnapped for a theme park. When they’re reunited, big dino instructs baby dino in the carnivore’s art. And who better to hunt down than their nerdy kidnapper? Justice is juicy.
And Spielberg’s dinos, manipulated by a small army of puppeteers, are watchable enough. But these artificial critters have little reason to be resurrected in our era, let alone on 3,300 screens over Memorial Day weekend. Seamless special effects can’t hide a story line as stitched together as Frankenstein’s monster. Screenwriter David Koepp admits as much in a self-sacrificing cameo (he’s identified in the credits as “Unlucky Bastard”): a pissed-off T-rex tosses him face-first through a San Diego store window.
