• Director: Steven Spielberg
• With: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, Sir Richard Attenborough, Pete Postletwaithe, Arliss Howard, Peter Stormare, Rochard Schiff, Vanessa Chester, Harvey Jason, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Ian Abercrombie
• Music by: John Williams
• Duration: 2h09
• Studio: Universal Pictures
• Rating: 8/10

Synopsis:

A research team is sent to an island eighty-seven miles away from the previous home of Jurassic Park, to document and photograph the now liberated dinosaurs. However, InGen the BioEngineering company has sent another larger team to the same island to catch, sedate, and transport some dinosaurs to San Diego where they will be used in a new Jurassic Park location. But life always finds a way. Will both teams return to the mainland with successful findings? Or will another tragedy occur?

Review:

Something has survived

Jeff Goldblum is back is Ian Malcolm in this second Jurassic Park movie, The Lost World. And he’s back on an island filled with dinosaurs, only this time there are no fences.

Hammond sends a team to Isla Sorna, Site B. This is where they actually created the animals before sending them to Isla Nublar. Now InGen, taken over by Hammond’s sinister nephew, wants to pillage the island and bring the dino’s to San Diego, in order to create a park everyone can visit.

One of the team members Hammond sends is Sarah Harding, Malcolm’s girlfriend. So what was once a research team now has become a rescue party!

Once on the island everyone, apart from Jurassic Park survivor Ian Malcolm, is awestruck by the sight of these creatures. But there are some unexpected surprises for the team. The first being a stowaway on the trailer, Malcolm’s daughter. And second surprise is another team has landed with more and better equipment but with only one objective: capture as much animals as possibly can. One of these people is professional hunter, Roland Tembo. His goal is to capture and kill a male T-Rex to add it to his collection. He uses an infant T-Rex to get to his goal. But Malcolm’s team foils his plans.

And before they know it, all is lost. People start dying and the rest is being hunted by predators bigger and more vicious than they have ever met.

The Lost World is definitely not as iconic as Jurassic Park but the movie has great moments and in the whole of the franchise it just fits. It brings back one of the most loved characters from the original movie and it adds some scenes from the original book that were left out of the first movie.

This being said, it deviates enormously from the source material, being the novel that was published in 1995. And that’s a real shame! It actually leaves 90% behind and Spielberg and David Koepp wrote an entire new story for this movie. As a fan of the book I loathe moviemakers for this choice. So I had to overcome the idea and just watch this movie as if the book never existed. It’s the only way I am truly able to love it. (Make no mistake: I do love it even with all the mistakes and with the lack of usage of the source material)

The movie itself has some real iconic moments and dialogue like the chase of the dinos by InGen, the ‘Oohs and Aahs‘ speech by Malcolm (as well as ‘Mommy’s very angry’)! And of course there’s the raptor attack and a loose T-Rex in the city! Iconic!

And say what you want, the dinos are still the best thing in this entire franchise, so lifelike!