When I reviewed Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” and its cinematic counterpart, I discussed why I felt the movie was better because it took the idea set in place, kept true to the original theme and built a fun, thrilling adventure that still called on its audience to think every now and again. This is a concept completely lost by the creative team behind the sequel, “The Lost World.” This movie is nearly unrecognizable from the source material in plot, character and underlying message, and while the first movie managed to deviate and improve, this one comes across as clunky and absurd — even as far as stories about dinosaurs go.
Crichton published “The Lost World” in 1995, basing its title and main premise around Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work of the same name. The story centers around mathematician Ian Malcolm and his persistent, brilliant and thoroughly annoying colleague Richard Levine and their quest to find Site B, the secret island where InGen let their engineered dinosaurs run wild. Levine disappears on the island, forcing Malcolm to lead a rescue mission to find him. Among his crew is field scientist Sarah Harding, with whom Malcolm once had a relationship, and two grade-school student helpers of Levine, Arby and Kelly, who stow away to lend their aid to the grown-ups. The group eventually all meet up and begin their experiment: to study the dinos and try to learn why they became extinct.
Meanwhile, though, the nefarious Lewis Dodgson returns to once again steal dinosaurs from InGen so he can make his fortune. His misdeeds force Malcolm’s crew to escape from the island (leaving behind a small body count for the dinosaurs), but not before Malcolm and his chaos theory mind uncovers the secret to extinction.
The movie’s plot is … different, to say the least.
Levine, the character who gets the plot moving in the book, is absent. Dodgson, the book’s antagonist, is absent. The two child characters are combined into one, Kelly, who is made into Malcolm’s disagreeable daughter. John Hammond, the mind behind Jurassic Park, sets Malcolm on his mission to Site B as a changed man who now just wants to observe the extinct dinosaurs as his business falls to pieces. Malcolm goes with a two-man crew: Eddie Carr, who builds the team’s technical equipment, and Nick Van Owen, an aggressive environmentalist photographer who is played by Vince Vaughn and who wasn’t in the book. They go to meet Harding, who in the movie is anxious to get to the island and who is currently dating Malcolm, both changes from the book, which saw her to Site B much later than the rest.
The movie provides almost no time for sitting back and observing the dinos in their natural habitat, which is perfectly fine for the blockbuster the movie was always going to be. The film’s antagonists are a huge group of safari hunters seeking to bag the biggest game the Earth has ever seen. Malcolm and Co. foil their plots to disrupt nature, but before long, the two sides are working together to escape from the island. After some run-ins with compys, raptors and the like, the humans make it back to the States with two additions to the party: an adult T-rex and an injured baby Rex. The papa escapes and rampages through San Diego before Malcolm and Harding get the dinos back on a ship to their home island.
The movie’s surreal ending is where most people raise their complaints about the film, as it is by far the biggest deviation from the source material. It was born from an earlier scene in both versions that serves as the plot’s turning point, when the injured baby is brought back to Malcolm’s site and the parent Rexes tear the trailer apart trying to get it back. For the rest of its flaws, the movie handled this moment perfectly, and it’s easily the most thrilling part of the film. The escape from the island, while notably different from the book’s events, are still entertaining and well executed. The improved CGI and continued use of animatronics makes the adventures even better than the first movie.
“The Lost World” could have succeeded as a mindless rehash of “Jurassic Park” save for one vital area: character. Except for Jeff Goldblum’s lovably annoying Ian Malcolm, none of the characters in the movie are remotely interesting, a complete 180 from the book, in which discussions of philosophical and scientific differences carry the day and readers pray that the crew members, even the grating Levine, make it out alive. The biggest problem I found with the “Jurassic Park” book was that few characters were differentiable from one another. The film version fixed that issue with great performances and charming dialogue.
In the case of “The Lost World,” the roles are reversed: The book had terrific characters, while the movie was filled with bland raptor fodder. The moment Eddie dies isn’t nearly as heartbreaking in the movie because he’d basically been a doofus up to that point. Kelly is completely irrelevant in the movie, while in the book, her interactions with her role model Harding provide some terrific character development. No one in the movie really has a distinct personality; oddly enough, in the end, I felt the most emotion toward the lead safari hunter because his journey actually includes some pathos.
As “Jurassic Park” showed, a film’s story doesn’t have to match up with the book’s to make a good adaptation. But “The Lost World” shows that you have to realize what the book’s strengths were and try to utilize them in the movie version. Otherwise, you might think sending a Tyrannosaurus through suburbia is a good climax to your film.
