987. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite

Director: Steven Spielberg

Running Time: 128 mins

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is an American film and the sequel to Jurassic Park. After it emerges that some dinosaurs survived on a separate island, a team of specialists are sent there to study them, only to be met by another team with other ambitions.

This is a bitterly disappointing sequel to one of the greatest blockbusters of all time. It loses its awe-inspiring sense of wonder as well as its genuinely interesting and enjoyable characters, and replaces it all with the generic monster movie plot that works more on jump scares than actual tension and excitement.

This film still has brilliant visual effects and pretty entertaining action sequences, so it’s still a bit of fun to look at, although the largely darker cinematography which only lasted for twenty minutes or so in the first film lasts for the entire film, making it a little less exciting on the eyes.

The action is somewhat borrowed from the first film, and the overall excitement just isn’t so powerful as it was originally. That’s in part due to the fact that you don’t really care about the characters, because they’ve either been turned into generic action heroes, or the new ones just don’t add anything to the story except being another option for the dinosaurs to munch on.

Also, the fact that this plot is so predictable and clichéd means that there’s no reason to feel scared for anyone. The first one had that to some degree, there was enough slow-building tension to make each individual scene suspenseful, as well as the overall sense of isolation that isn’t present here. This is just one long running away from dinosaurs Godzilla parody, which doesn’t offer two hours of excitement in any way.

What’s more is that this goes completely over the top. The first film, whilst having a totally preposterous concept, managed to keep things isolated and small enough to make it realistic. Here, it all goes out of control, and despite having some nice ideas that hark back to classic monster movies like King Kong, the story here just doesn’t work to make a convincing and exciting story, it’s just a generic blockbuster, so that’s why it gets a 6.6 from me.