The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Look, I'll be honest with you: I went into a rewatch of The Lost World: Jurassic Park fully prepared to write it off as a lazy cash-grab, and it's just not quite that. It's not good in the way the original is good, not even close, but it's not the disaster its reputation sometimes suggests either. There's a film in here worth watching, even if you have to do a bit of digging to find it.

The moment that still gets me, the one that felt genuinely audacious when I first saw it as a kid, is the T-Rex loose in suburban Los Angeles. A massive predator stomping through garden fences, peering into bedroom windows, swallowing the family dog whole. It shouldn't work, and in some ways it doesn't, because it tips the whole thing into a kind of Godzilla-lite territory that sits awkwardly alongside everything that came before. But there's also something thrillingly daft about it. Spielberg committed to the bit, and I respect that, even when the bit is a bit much.

The problem is that everything surrounding those high points feels like it's running at about seventy percent. The cast simply doesn't have the same chemistry or spark as Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum is still Jeff Goldblum, and there's obvious pleasure in watching him do his thing, but the supporting characters around him are fairly thin. You're not particularly worried about most of them when the raptors start closing in, and that's a real problem for a film that depends on tension and stakes.

It also drags. There's a stretch in the middle of the film, somewhere around the point where the two groups of people are blundering around the island getting picked off one by one, where my attention started to wander. The original earned its running time because every scene felt purposeful, every character beat meant something. Here, whole sequences feel like padding dressed up in expensive special effects. Spielberg is clearly capable of so much more economy and precision. You can see it in something like Duel, where he wrings unbearable tension from almost nothing. Here he's working with dinosaurs and a blockbuster budget and somehow making it feel looser.

And yet. The set pieces, when they land, genuinely land. The scene in the cracked glass trailer dangling off a cliff is properly nerve-shredding. The long grass sequence has real menace to it. When the film remembers what made the first one work, that primal fear of being hunted by something enormous and indifferent, it clicks into gear. Spielberg hasn't forgotten how to build a sequence. He just seems less interested in making sure the bits between them are equally tight.

I know the received wisdom puts this well below Jurassic Park III in the sequel rankings, but I'd actually push back on that. I think I prefer the third film, funnily enough, maybe because it's leaner and has no illusions about what it is. But The Lost World has a bit more ambition, even if that ambition occasionally trips over itself. It's trying to be something bigger and stranger, and occasionally it gets there.

Three stars. Not a patch on the original, but there's enough of that old Spielberg flair flickering through to make it worth your time, especially if you're doing a franchise marathon. Just don't go in expecting magic, and you might come out mildly impressed rather than actively disappointed. Sometimes that's the best a sequel can offer.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1997  | Watched: 2025-04-14

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Steven Spielberg: Duel (1971) · Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) · Jurassic Park (1993)
More with Jeff Goldblum: Independence Day (1996) · Jurassic Park (1993)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)