As I write this in August 2025, there is still an opportunity to watch incredible creatures eating folks in your local theaters. No, I’m not talking about the unsettling weirdness that is Pedro Pascal in Fantastic Four: First Steps, you sillies! I mean dinosaurs! Honest to goodness, slathered with CGI dinosaurs! Yes, there are probably tons of them in Jurassic World: Rebirth, which I haven’t seen yet because $26.75 for a single matinee ticket is a bit steep for my meager pocketbook.
To add insult to injury, getting a 15 lb. box of Junior Mints, a 64 oz watered down Diet Caffeine-Free Cherry Coke Zero Classic II, and a Thunderbucket-sized popcorn drenched with butter-flavored Quaker State High Mileage Synthetic would set me back the equivalent of the entire marketing budgets for Marvel Studios for the past two fiscal years. (And frankly for Disney/Marvel, spending that much on my admission and concessions to see the third sequel to Jurassic World which is also the seventh overall entry in the Jurassic Park/World series would be the first smart spending opportunity they’ve made in the past two fiscal years. Heck, I’d even throw in the 40 lb. bag of Twizzlers and still come out ahead of whatever was blown on marketing Captain America: Brave New World.)
But I digress, as I am often wont to do. But soft, let us repair back to the halcyon days of the late 1990s, when a plucky director named Steven Spielberg was returning to the director’s chair after a prolonged absence to return to the universe of one of his greatest triumphs. No, not 1941, it was Jurassic Park 2!
The Sequel: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Original Movie: Jurassic Park (1993)
Key Cast/Production Staff Returning from 1st Installment:
| Jeff Goldblum | Dr. Ian Malcolm |
| Richard Attenborough | John Hammond |
| Joseph Mazzello | Tim Murphy |
| Ariana Richards | Lex Murphy |
| Steven Spielberg | Director |
| John Williams | Composer |
| David Koepp | Screenwriter |
| Michael Kahn | Editor |
To Start With:
“OK, so there is another island of dinosaurs, no fences this time, and you wanna send people in, very few people, on the ground? Right? And who are these four lunatics that you’re-you’re trying to con into this?”
What a daunting task. When Spielberg left for a bit of a sabbatical from directing, it was after the 1-2 punch of Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park. Spielberg had finally achieved richly deserved awards and accolades for Schindler’s List and the incredible financial success of Jurassic Park. Either one of those films for any director would have been legendary, but Spielberg released both in less than a year. To follow up either one would have been challenging, but both? How could Spielberg top himself when he went beyond the peak of the mountain with these films?
Well, life found a way. Ideas for a Jurassic Park sequel had formed as soon as the first film earned more money than had ever been printed since the beginning of recorded history. I think the most obvious route for Spielberg would have been having Chief Brody stumble upon a prehistoric megalodon that protects an ancient power rune that Indiana Jones needs to find before the Nazis use it to communicate with Roy Neary’s alien mothership, but cooler uncool heads prevailed, and we ended up with going to an island…filled with dinosaurs…again. Yes, again.
Sam Neill and Laura Dern opted not to return from the first installment. Apparently, behind the scenes they didn’t get along with the actual velociraptors, so it was either them or them, so Spielberg chose them. (No, not them, the other them. Do try to keep up.) But since Jeff Goldblum had not only saved the entire planet from invading aliens in Powder but also sympathetically interacted with a paranormal powered albino man in Independence Day, Spielberg tapped him to return be the name closest to being above the title. Vince Vaughn was gathered up after astonishing filmmakers by saying “babies” for a record 267 times in Swingers. Julianne Moore was hired as she had experience working with dinosaurs since she had starred with Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights.
Stories were thrown against the wall, plots were constructed, and there was a hodgepodge of a cacophony of a potpourri that was whipped together and sprinkled with a bit of dino DNA and voila! The Lost World: Jurassic Park was released to initially irritate the public due to that convoluted title that abused the colon like saturated fats. Somehow audiences got past the title and the film went on to gross only about 13 dollars less than the first one. So Universal was pleased, ideas were already being developed for a third Jurassic entry, and Spielberg was already running away to his next project that would be added to the list of films where the plot involves rescuing Matt Damon.
But at the end of the day, The Lost World: Jurassic Park had done it! All was right with the world, right? Riiiight…? Weeeellll… No. Not really. Thankfully, Spielberg sped the train along enough to mostly distract the audience from thinking too much about TLW:JP. But as one who did see this in a cinema, let me tell you that the ensuing walk to the car in the parking lot, the resulting drive home from the theater, and the subsequent drawings of breath over the past three decades have caused nothing but questions about this movie. So let’s dive into this marvelous format for Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World: Jurassic Park: The Quickening.
Anything Done Better than the Original?
“Oh, you’re breaking our hearts! Saddle up, let’s get this moveable feast under way!”
Casting Pete Postlethwaite as the great white hunter Roland Tembo was a stroke of brilliance. To be honest, I would have rather watched him and his crew dealing with and surviving against the dino population of Isla Sorna. He lends such gravitas and such presence that you wish he was there from the beginning, and you sorely miss him for the last quarter of the film. Let’s all be thankful for the late, great Postlethwaite.
Spielberg shows that when in command of set pieces where he is truly invested, there is no one better. The entire section of the film starting when Julianne Moore brings the injured infant T. Rex to the mobile RV HQ through to the moment when she, Goldblum, and Vaughn are rescued by the hunters, is a clinic on suspense and tension. You can feel yourself squirming in your seat, getting wrapped up in the action. It only gets better as soon as the trailer goes over the cliff side. It’s a masterclass conducted by Spielberg. A highlight in any director’s showcase to be sure.
Anything as Good as the Original?
“Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”
Jeff Goldblum is a welcome sight as always. Even though he’s back as Ian Malcolm, he’s essentially playing Jeff Goldblum, which is always great. However, as the film progresses, he tends to fade away a bit into the background. He vanishes entirely during the T. Rex chase to the waterfall until he manages to pop in after the fact as if to say, “Hey, I’m still in the movie guys!” He limps when it’s important to the plot and doesn’t have to when it isn’t. Truth be told, him having a permanent limp because of his injuries from the first movie would have been ideal. Perhaps that was the idea here, but the continuity certainly doesn’t support that. Also, you could have lost Vince Vaughn’s character entirely and given the slack to Goldblum. Jeff’s the lead, so let him lead.
As always, it is great to see Richard Attenborough. True, the kids from Jurassic Park are back too, but ultimately this film doesn’t care about them, so they literally walk off in the middle of an early scene to never be seen/heard again. Given how irrelevant all the kids ultimately are in this movie, they’re the lucky ones who at least get to leave. But Attenborough gets to bookend the film which is pleasant. Sidenote: don’t you wish that there was a bit of fourth wall breaking in the first movie where John Hammond talks about how the park hired David Attenborough instead to do the narrating on the tour? Side-side note: Yes, I typed out Attenborough every single time and did not copy and paste it just to impress all of you!
Anything Not-So-Good as the Original?
“Mommy’s very angry.”
Julianne Moore looks disinterested throughout, like she’s fighting a head cold or a migraine or both. It is a shame as she is a solid actress, but the material does her no favors. The film doesn’t know whether she’s brilliant or ditzy. She tells Vince Vaughn not to smoke because of the smell but then leaves her heavily scented favorite backpack behind in the middle of nowhere when dashing off to photograph stegosaurs. After she shuts down a paleontologist by her talking about how the T. Rex has a great sense of smell, she stupidly wears a jacket that has the infant T. Rex’s blood on it and then dares to be surprised when the T. Rexes come a-calling to the camp?! How can the script allow her to be that dumb?
Vince Vaughn is also wasted in this story. He’s more of a tagalong, with some moments but there’s no chance for his character to breathe. Heck, even if he was competing with Goldblum for Moore that’d be something. But no, he takes photos, never really gets injured, ends up successfully getting an electrical system working that’s been rotting away in the jungle for years after hurricanes, and luckily manages to at least ditch the entire last act of the film to get ready to kill his career’s momentum by being in Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake.
And John Williams. Oh, John, what happened? Normally, his scores soar. His score for Jurassic Park is a triumph. But here? The movie seems like it wants to have a theme of its own, maybe even a darker version of the first movie’s theme, but it never gets going. It’s as if the filmmakers wanted a score that was a pastiche on Williams instead of using Williams himself, like one of the later Superman or Jaws sequels. I understand that this is TLW:JP, which is its own colon:movie. But the man has set his own bar so high, I can allow for a near miss now and then. My guess is that Williams saw the film he was scoring, and it didn’t provoke inspiration like the first film. This was a paint by numbers gig that failed to include all the colors for Williams, just like The Rise of Skywalker or Dial of Destiny.
Anything Far Worse than the Original?
“Taking dinosaurs off this island is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas.”
I know that Jurassic Park III gets a lot of crap, but at the very least, that story goes from point A to point B with a flow. That story is simple, but that’s okay. I’m a simple member of the unwashed folk who just wants to see people running in terror from dinosaurs. The Lost World: Jurassic Park just overcomplicates this with story cul-de-sacs, shifting them as the winds see fit. There are germs of 3 or four fine storylines, but they never have a chance to breathe, they never give a chance for character development.
Here are just a few plot non-starters:
- What if Ian Malcolm had a girlfriend and we didn’t really care because they never really showed any chemistry together? I mean, c’mon. No hugs or kisses or warm embraces or making her a cappuccino or anything?
- What if Malcolm had a daughter who has actual dialogue for about ten minutes and then became baggage? (At least she gets an arc with closure on her gymnastics background. And at least she managed to get out of the last quarter of the movie too. She must have been on the same flight as Vince Vaughn and they shared a car to the airport.)
- Why do we spend so much time on Peter Stormare’s character’s eventual death? He isn’t around long enough to be a massive prick, just a guy that gets into Vaughn’s face and tasers li’l flesh eating dinos. (By the way, you or I would totally do the same because we know that those little bastards attacked that friendly little girl in the beginning. So don’t get all faux-sympathetic on me. Fire up the cattle prod.)
- Did raptors knock off every single member of the hunting expedition that ran through the tall grass? But Vince Vaughn, armed only with a binder and sarcasm, somehow managed to get through without any incident or accident?
- Speaking of which, where’d Vince Vaughn go after he miraculously managed to get weather/jungle damaged communication equipment working because he did? Was he hiding out in a broom closet as Malcolm and Company were being hounded by the raptors? Did he fire up a game of FreeCell on the InGen computers and just wait for the others to show up someday?
- And all tropical jungle rot is explained away by having “geothermal” power used on the premises? Really? So power in the ground manages to stave off mold and rust and wiring deterioration and moisture and insects and big arse dinosaurs among a myriad of other things? Incredible stuff it is.
And then there’s the ending. Having a T. Rex on the loose in a well-lit San Diego is absolutely mind-numbing. Granted, if you were a kid looking outside your bedroom window and you saw a dinosaur, it would be rather shocking. I think if Spielberg didn’t show the T. Rex walking into the backyard in the first place and made seeing the huge dino head at the window a terrific reveal, I would be better with the choice.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What exactly attacked the ship’s crew that had the T. Rex on it? Pteranodons? Raptors? The T. Rex in disguise as a crew member who picked everyone off in a diabolical plan that involved intrigue, betrayal, and love? The crew must have been in communication before landing in San Diego, right? Did the T. Rex use a Han Solo-type improvised ploy over the radio and say that everything was fine there and asked how they were?
Since when is Julianne Moore a crack shot with a tranquilizer rifle? What in her character’s limited established background even shows this ability? Not even a throwaway line about how she was a skeet shooting champion back in 1984. Or how she mastered the art of playing Duck Hunt on the NES. Instead, there’s nothing.
Also why did Malcolm and her jump over the side of the crashed freighter into the water below? They had already got the infant into the hold and could have just hid inside the bridge or in a cabin. Then they could just await the adult T. Rex, who is more focused on the infant, and then try to dart it without too much worry. But they launch over the side and John Hammond’s nephew, the incompetent and rude Slimy McFarthead or whatever his name was, goes into the hold to get cornered and eaten by an infant T. Rex. Hooray, I guess? Again, why’d they go over the side and risk smashing into unseen crash debris in the murky depths?
Follow-up installments?
John Hammond: “Don’t worry, I’m not making the same mistakes again.”
Dr. Ian Malcolm: “No, you’re making all new ones.”
Of course there were follow-ups! Jurassic Park made gobs and gobs of filthy lucre! But I’m not going to dive too deep into all these entries. There’s not enough bandwidth in the world and so many other outlets have already talked at length about this franchise. Not to mention the toys and video games and the comic books and the party favors and Taco Bell meals and bath towels and the licensed 1:1 scale animatronic Brachiosaurus that you can build with just three easy steps and a quarter of a billion dollars. It is just so much! So here’s some RV hanging off a cliff’s notes on each series entry.
Jurassic Park III (2001)
- Sam Neill returns with a smidge of Laura Dern. More Isla Sorna and there’s a Spinosaurus, which is bigger and badder than the other bigger and badder dinos. John Diehl is hired and is ultimately thanklessly wasted. There’s T. Rex pee. We are supposed to believe that Tea Leoni, even though she’s a bargain Sharon Stone, would marry William H. Macy. A dinosaur talks to Sam Neill on an airplane. Pterodactyls? How were they ever going to be displayed at the park? With all that said, history has been far kinder to this entry than you remember.
Jurassic World (2015)
- We’re back on Isla Nublar. Chris Pratt talks to velociraptors and Bryce Dallas Howard has the most durable pumps known to man. Pterodactyls are still thought to be a good idea for the park. There are rolling tourist balls. No old cast members return beyond the original T. Rex and B.D. Wong, but no one remembers him, so he cries and creates a larger, smarter, more violent hybrid dino to feast on a public that is somehow becoming more jaded about seeing living and breathing dinosaurs. Vincent D’onofrio leaves crumbs from his scenery chewing everywhere.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
- Pratt and Howard return. Jeff Goldblum is back, sorta. Oh and B.D. Wong is back too and still no one really remembers him. Isla Nublar is now an active volcano because no one can have nice things when it comes to putting a dino park there. Dinosaurs are sold to mega rich folks because…reasons. Then dinosaurs are brought to the mainland ultimately escape. No Japanese businessmen are shown stereotypically fleeing in terror, so that puts it above The Lost World: Jurassic Park in this one instance.
Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)
- Pratt, Howard, Goldblum, Neill, Dern, Wong, and T. Rex and a couple of carryovers we don’t care about all come back in a movie about giant bugs and, time permitting, dinosaurs. Campbell Scott portrays a character that was in the first movie. Since that character is still smarting from Wayne Knight making fun of him 30 years ago, he’s many much more eviler. The T. Rex has become a pro at playing possum during big dino fights and is one of the best actors in the film. By the end, dinosaurs still roam around the planet and apparently, the world is supposed to be wonderfully obliging about that.
Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)
- Apparently, to counter the events of Dominion, dinosaurs now can’t just go willy-nilly all over Earth and are confined to the Equator, because of course they are. No previous characters from the series return, not even B.D. Wong. Remember him? Scarlett Johansson is a tough as nails covert expert who has tight pants and isn’t Black Widow but probably should have been. David Koepp from the first two Jurassic Park movies is back for the script which involves a completely new island for different dino research, but thankfully no destructive tours of San Diego. People went to see this movie instead of Fantastic Four: First Steps and James Gunn’s Superman, directed by James Gunn who coincidentally was the director James Gunn on James Gunn’s Superman as well. Audiences probably made the right choice watching the lovely ScarJo.
And Finally:
“Isla Nublar was just a showroom, something for the tourists. Site B was the factory floor. That was Isla Sorna, 80 miles from Nublar. We bred the animals there and nurtured them for a few months and then moved them into the park.”
It sounds like I’m coming down on The Lost World: Jurassic Park: The Movie and yes, I am. A little. If you don’t think about these things over the past three decades, the movie still plays well. My teenage daughter saw it for the first time this month and was in without a problem. Of course, afterwards her parents ruined it by bringing up all the script issues, but that’s our prerogative. Taking away fun is what parents do. Yours did it, ours did it, and now we do it proudly.
And the Jurassic World sequels got even further afield with their plotting as they went along, so TLW:JP gets a retroactive upgrade in appreciation. I don’t think it earns it, but much like Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (another limp Spielberg joint of a sequel), it gets more love merely because of the lesser series entries that came after it.
Steven Spielberg from 1971 to 1993 has more winners than not with a solid record indeed. Post 1993, it gets a bit sketchier for him. Not that the movies weren’t well made, since they were. But the fun Spielberg took a back seat to the artist Spielberg. Gone was the guy who directed Raiders of the Lost Ark and produced Back to the Future and The Goonies. Here instead was the guy that gave the world Amistad and The Post and The Terminal; not bad movies, but not the pop cultural touchpoints the earlier fare was, is, and will be. I love you Steve, but someone had to tell you this. Oh, and please stop remaking stuff. Let Tim Burton die on that hill, not you.
And since I’m feeling bad about dumping on The Lost World; Jurassic Park, I’m going to fix one plot point since that’s the least I could do. After Pete Postlethwaite leaves Isla Sorna a changed man after seeing the death that was around him, have him be the guy that shoots the tranquilizer rifle at the T. Rex in the hold! After all, he’s shown to be the guy that knows how to operate the weapon, is a crack shot, and remember that he was the one that tranquilized the T. Rex originally. Then he can meet up with Moore and Goldblum, helping them out of the water since they stupidly jumped over the side of the ship. Pete could outstretch a hand in the same way when Moore was helped back up after the RV went over the cliff. He could get a line like “It seems I’m always helping pull you people up.” Pete can say that he knew that there would be trouble because Hammond’s nephew was a drunken dolt, so that’s a simple reason why he came to San Diego. At the very least he gets a nice arc.
Well, an arc that doesn’t involve ham-fisted parallel bars and a stunt double.
“What are you talking about? Five years of work and a hundred miles of electrified fence couldn’t prepare the other island. And you think that, what? A couple dozen Marlboro men were going to make a difference here?”
A Full Rich Blather 