The Lost World - Jurassic Park

The Lost World - Jurassic Park is a nastier, more overtly comedic second instalment that cuts the dimwit awe of the original film to jampack itself with queasy set-pieces. Framed as an expedition straight out of King Kong, Steven Spielberg's follow-up also takes a few basic structural cues from Aliens. As with James Cameron's sequel our lead is a reluctant survivor, in this case Jeff Goldblum's Dr Ian Malcolm, being forced back into the fray. Like Ripley, Malcolm is (eventually) flanked by a team of experts armed with military hardware that also kind of looks like lightly dressed filmmaking equipment.

Spielberg's tonal approach is largely and, I suppose, refreshingly impartial. The Dinosaurs aren't demonised, no matter who they gobble up. It is understood that the humans are trespassers wandering, uninvited, into the habitat of these animals. That makes them fair game. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp construct a never-ending attack factory that quickly whittles this army of extras down to something more dramatically manageable. So, while Jurassic Park had action sequences that revolved around surviving in close proximity to prehistoric monsters with Spielberg playing the moment, trusting that the effects were a big enough presence to maintain interest, the Lost World presumes that this element of surprise has been forfeited. These dinosaurs are therefore demoted to a further, spikier layer of threat in a series of minutely composed catastrophes, often including upended machinery.

Consequently, The Lost World's joys are more to do with pure filmmaking technique than anything specifically organic. These characters may have arcs but for some reason they all terminate around the 100 minute mark. The San Diego finale that follows this resolution therefore feels completely tacked on. Key characters, such as Vince Vaughn's photographer, are absent for no stated reason and the two leads have picked up incongruent action abilities between scenes. Spielberg's film also stops dead in its tracks for several minutes while we cycle through some lame suburban skit about night terrors. Lost World's best stretch comes earlier then: a breathless charge towards an extraction point that caps the second act. During this gauntlet the dwindling survivors have to dodge both a pack of Velociraptors and the two vengeful Tyrannosaurs.

Pete Postlethwaite's Roland Tembo is an interesting presence in this section, another Great White Hunter explicitly testing himself against these ancient titans. Tembo lugs around a double-barrelled cannon and, like centuries of forebears who cannot abide massive animals living undisturbed lives, he hopes to blast a hole in the Bull Rex. Though when he does finally fells his quarry, Tembo quickly slips into a depressive funk. He may have successfully brought down the greatest apex predator in history but he's lost too many friends along the way. Tembo doesn't feel this victory, he's burnt himself out. Simultaneously, Malcolm and pals are scrambling all over a dilapidated communications hot-spot, pursued by drooling Deinonychi. Although they haven't really clashed, at this point every major character has had their personal objectives converge then conclude. It's a shame that there's another twenty minutes of The Lost World to go. Still, if nothing else, those superfluous minutes do offer the audience a chance to see a crowd of millionaires experiencing a collective concussion as the genetic horrors they've cultivated make landfall in the United States.