They managed to ruin a good book

Rating: 6/10 (14 February 1999)

The film really disappointed me. The first "Jurassic Park" was a film with amazing effects where the story didn't get in the way. After seeing "Jurassic Park" I read the books, and I think "Lost World" was a fairly good book. It also had an interesting message: The ecosystem heavily depends on the behaviour of the animals. The more intelligent life gets (and the raptors are portrayed as rather intelligent) the more their behaviour depends on education - passed from parents to their children. The first generation of animals on that island were or course raised without parents, thus missing their education. Their behaviour was not "natural", making a functional ecology on that island impossible. The project was doomed from the beginning.
The movie completely dismissed this point of view, rather giving the opposite message: Those dinosaurs will form a functioning ecology if we let them in peace. They left out any intellectual interesting concept of the book, instead relying only on cliches (big companies are evil, evil men are dumb etc.) and on the special effects. Which, by the way, didn't seem to have been improved since the first part.
Summary: A mediocre film saved only a little by the fascination we have for dinosaurs.