Rating of
2.5/4
"Lost World: Jurassic Park" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 01/28/12
Another team returns to Ingen's research facility to document the dinosaurs in their natural environment but find themselves in a race against time to stop another team sent by the corporation to pillage the animals to populate a new theme park. I always thought that the original Jurassic Park was hugely over-rated; once you got past the Oooh! and Aah! factor of the special effects, the weak story meant that there was little more to it than a computer generated zoo full of fake animals. The SFX of its sequel are just as impressive, but now we can't switch on the Discovery channel without being confronted by herds of computer generated dinosaurs it seems a lot less of a big deal. Jeff Goldblum reprises the least uninteresting of the characters from the original and tempers the dry scientific mumbo jumbo with a peppering of funny one-liners, Pete Postlethwaite brings some presence to the screen as a morally ambiguous big game hunter and Julianne Moore is a lot more tolerable than Laura Dern as the romantic interest. The plot is pretty much a rehash of King Kong as the team are confronted with bloodthirsty dinos in a series of well engineered set pieces leading up to a somewhat tacked-on sequence as Rex Kong crashes through San Diego, but the character dynamic is a lot more interesting with a team of bad guys to clash with and although they once again insisted on inflicting a child on us, she's a lot less irritating than the previous two. As a whole, it's purely an exercise in milking the dino, but it's done with efficiency from one of the masters of popular entertainment.
