"No, you're making all new ones."

Rating: 7/10 (18 November 2008)

There are many reasons this is better than JURASSIC PARK. Here's ten:
10. It's got slightly less overt product placement.
9. It dispenses with the pseudo-science babble and gets straight to monsters eating people. LOST WORLD's primary virtue is the enlarged cast of dinosaur bait, in the persons of Blonde from Fargo, Private Cowboy et al.
8. One imperiled child is better than two, even though this one delivers one of the genre's most embarrassing moments when she does a ludicrous gymnastic routine to avoid being eaten. Which would have been better.
7. The straight-up adventure format allows for maximum face-time between beast and human, in much more inventive confrontations.
6. This one starts fast and never stops - within a half hour dinosaurs have screaming men in their mouths, a motif repeated with happy consistency for another 90 minutes.
5. The trailer-over-the-cliff set piece alone is worth three JURASSIC PARKs. Julianne Moore falling on that spiderwebbed glass window, and Arliss Howard trying to get ropes and winches and Mercedes to help, is one of the best-executed sequences I've seen in a long life of watching not very well-executed summer pictures.
4. I always wanted to see a Tyrannosaur knock a bus into a Blockbuster.
3. Jeff Goldblum has more screen time.
2. Sam Neill doesn't have any.
1. Neither does Wayne Knight.
Okay, it's also very stupid. Yes it is. Anybody who can't forgive it for that gymnastic thing is justified in my book. There's also a handful of idiocies, like Julianne Moore "working with predators since I was 20", then hanging up a blood-soaked jacket like a windsock above a sleeping child; like a 40 foot lizard getting through customs and into downtown San Diego without INS paperwork or at least a police escort.
Whatever. It ain't Stephen Hawking. It's Michael Crichton.