The Lost World: Jurassic Park

by Cindy Fuchs

Directed by Steven Spielberg
A Universal Pictures Release

recommended

The scientists meet the Stegasaurs.

Steven Spielberg's sequel to Jurassic Park may be the first big-studio movie that kills off the dog. Given the prevalence of plucky filmic canines who survive terrible ordeals — white-water rapids, burned-down houses, highway tunnelcollapses, tornados, lava, alien invasions — this little plot point might count as something of a risk. No doubt it's a risk calculated to appeal to viewers familiar with genre clichs and CGI effects, kids who come into the theater already sold ondino-wear and Jeff Goldblum action figures: clearly, there's not much under the ILM sun that can surprise them. So the dead dog, along with a chewed-up little rich girl and other acts of yucky violence (most take place offscreen, with reaction shotsor aesthetically arranged blood or body parts registering the horror) do something else. They illustrate that what's at stake in thrill-ride movies is not so much innovation as repetition. After all, you can only want what you know.

The Lost World is, of course, a marketing marvel (its opening weekend numbers are excellent). It promises more of the same and delivers handsomely. The dinosaurs look great (enhanced digitizing and model-manipulating make monsters that areeven more brutish, slimy and 3D than the first time around), especially those looming tyrannosaurus rexes, who appear up close as demonic eyeballs, as major silhouetted jaws, as ripples in water puddles, and as rampaging beasties hot on the heels ofpuny humans. The plot once again concerns greedy, crude characters who pay dearly for meddling with nature, and nicer ones who survive. Like the original movie, this one draws obvious connections between consumption and colonialism, science andromance, Burger King and Captain Ahab. It solicits your participation while vaguely indicting you for it, so you can feel entertained and intelligent at the same time, the best of all worlds, lost and otherwise.

You feel this way because you get what you want: torqued-up violence. Don't even complain that the adorable little girl doesn't deserve to be attacked or that the image of mom screaming might cause nightmares. To see the villains punished can't beenough; innocents must also be sacrificed, to insure your investment in the protagonists' danger. You're already having these nightmares and worse, the film supposes, so you might as well enjoy the artistry of this version of them. Broken down into aseries of aggressive set-pieces (with references ranging from The Lost World [1925] and Godzilla, to Jaws, ET and Aliens), the violence here is both seductive and thematic.

There's more of most everything here, more dinosaurs, more commotion, more heavy-duty assault hardware, and more bizarre, vaguely existential merchandising (the hamburger folks are pitching JP watches). There are more humans, which reduces to morepotential victims (in-depth characterization is not a question here, don't even think about it). Chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) returns Ripley-style, reluctantly undertaking a rescue mission when the ever-clueless John Hammond (RichardAttenborough, in a short scene) sends Ian's paleontologist girlfriend Sarah (Julianne Moore) to an island chock full of creatures who've been reproducing undisturbed since the last film (that is, for four years). Accompanied by photographer Nick(Vince Vaughan), equipment flunky Eddie (Richard Schiff) and daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), Ian/Goldblum is a decidedly cynical central consciousness, a not-very-heroic and pretty cranky audience surrogate.

Ian's good for anticipating the plot as you might, as when he finds Sarah oohing and ahhing at a herd of stegosauri, and he observes that this is "always the way it starts," followed by "running and screaming." Just as you'regetting restless for this next step, you get a warm-up action dose, as a pissed-off mama steg swings its spiked tail at Sarah, who has inadvertently startled baby steg with some noisy gizmo. It happens that Sarah's primary — not to say primal —concern is verifying dinosaurs' familial instincts (she wants to redress their bad reps as big cold-hearted reptiles), which she seriously misreads when she nurses an injured infant T. rex and both its parents come after it. At this point, theviolence gets especially pretty, as the angry parental units knock the truck full of humans over a cliff, so it's barely suspended and Sarah is thrown onto a window, with ominously spreading cracks beneath her hands and knees: it's really a bit ofvisual poetry, no matter the plot holes. Repeated attempts by Ian and Nick to grab hold of her are thwarted by mud, rain, faulty ropes and devices, and repeated thwacking by those irate dinosaurs.

The dichotomy incarnated by Ian and Sarah replicates the previous one (Laura Dern and Sam Neill), leading again to the point that good fathers come through in a crisis, almost in spite of themselves. (This concept is countered by the monstrousfamily's storyline, where mother-rex becomes the dominant force in reconstituting her family: it's plain that the dinosaurs are the deviants.) Sarah declares herself the "perfect girlfriend" because she's always traveling, and her interestsin family structures seem academic compared to Ian's more immediate focus on saving Kelly. But in the Spielbergian scheme of things, Sarah's autonomy and risk-taking mean that she eventually needs to be recuperated into some more conventional ways ofthinking, like, her boyfriend does know best.

I'd note here one addition to this movie's Spielbergian scheme of things: Kelly is black. Her mother is conspicuously unseen, but her briefly sketched relationship with Ian seems to be one of mutual respect. What's interesting is that her blacknessdoesn't figure in the plot, but she does stand out on the island. She does stand out, being the only black character with a speaking part aside from CNN anchor Bernard Shaw playing himself. She's also a gymnast, which actually does figure when she'scalled upon to rescue her dad, under siege by a bevy of velociraptors.

Like any Spielberg film, this one is full of white guys trying to work out their destinies. Certainly, the island (where nature is propagating freely and meat-eaters are beating up on other, cuter denizens) is metaphorical for the evils of corporatepolitics — that the manipulative Hammond uses Sarah to get Ian to the island is only the most obvious instance. The core group of nice endangered humans is soon joined by a small, less nice army of scientists, techies, and military mercenariesassembled by Hammond's profiteering nephew Peter (Arliss Howard). Assigned to bring back a T. rex for display at the San Diego Zoo, this crew is initially at odds with Ian and company, whose motives appear more benign: they only want photographs,afterwards imagining that they'll leave the beasties alone. Peter's team is headed by great-white-hunter throwback Roland (Pete Postlethwaite), whose aspiration to bag a T. rex is presented as somehow nobler than the materialistic preoccupations ofhis employer (in this way, he's clearly related to the combination veteran-visionary Robert Shaw character in Jaws).

That Ian and Roland eventually come down on the same side (looking for a way off the island) underlines that a common enemy (commercial or carnivorous) can make partners of even the most distinctly opposed adversaries. That the most visibly evilfolks get their just desserts suggests that a kind of cosmic justice prevails in the digitized future: Peter Stormare, last seen wood-chipping Steve Buscemi in Fargo and here cruelly stun-gunning tiny dinos called compsognathuses, is justlyripped to pieces, and you know that Hammond's nephew, sniffy and imperial when introduced, is doomed.

But not before he makes good on his plan to bring back a T. rex. Once in San Diego, it gets loose and tromps through suburban streets in search of its still-missing baby. Ian and Sarah end up driving this baby around in Ian's jazzy red convertible,leading mom away from the hapless rabble she's terrorizing. Spielberg says that he wanted to get to this image, and indeed, it is inspired: the many assaults on swimming pools, manicured lawns, expensive cars and video stores (not to mention the pup)assert your complicity in the dinosaurs' destructive impulses.

That you get what you want, even as you're set up to want it, makes the film work. While you assume you're identifying with the humans, you're also understanding the dinosaurs' motivations. The movie's emotional pitch is astute, its string ofclimaxes (lots of running and screaming by anonymous victims) is finely crafted, such that your anticipation of what's to come is repeatedly confirmed and twisted. It works despite and because of the fact that it corroborates the Spielbergian worldas an ordered, comprehensible, very white place, organized by causes and effects, ethical absolutes and discernible patterns (John Williams' score escalates, mayhem ensues). And it works despite and because it takes obvious joy in all itsrepetitions, in a way that's creepy enough to ask you to reconsider your desiring and digesting processes.