Quite Possibly, the most disappointing movie I have ever seen, it's not that bad, it's just disappointing

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2001)

I loved Jurassic Park. It totally blew me away. I loved it so much I picked up the book and read it. Then I read the sequel when it came out. I loved the book version of the Lost World twice as much as the original.
The thing about Michael Crichton's books is they can be easily made into movies. I really believe that. His books are practically screenplays, written in three acts (like movies) instead of the usual five (like books). The Lost World was filled with great action scenes, good characters, and a simple plot. I thought that a movie adaptation would be a piece of cake, especially in the hands of Spielberg. Whoa, I was way wrong.
The biggest problem with the movie is that they did not stick with the book. Now I know that a movie adaptation is never as good as the book it's based on (though that's not true with everything, like, say, Fight Club, sorry Chuck). But, the reason that usually is because books can have 6,8, or even 12 characters followed through the book, and the reader can keep up with it. That doesn't work in a movie because you have a limited amount of time to develop characters and in a book you have all the time you want. But the book The Lost World only had a few characters, and they could had cut a few of them out. But oh no. They had to cut out all the good characters like Dr. Thorn, Donson, and Levine, and then replace them with twice as many characters and keep the bad ones like Malcolm.
The Lost World suffers from what I call, `Too much, too quickly'. The plot is way too twisty in all the wrong ways. The characters are all badly developed, not to mention there are too many of them. And all of the wonder from the first film seems to have been totally sucked out. The villain from the book was replaced with an even bigger one. In the book, Donson (however you spell it) who you may remember as the guy who talked Denise Nedry into going traitor in the first film, came to the island to steal eggs. Well, in this movie, Donson has been replaced by hundreds of Engen employees who are trying to steal whole dinosaurs to put into a park back in California. I don't understand why they just didn't keep the simple villains from the book.
Here's an example of a missed opportunity. There is a scene in the book where our heroes are running from some raptors in the night. They hide in a gas station. The raptors stop following them. Levine (a good, scientist character from the book that they just dropped from the movie) notices that the gas station is another dinosaur's territory during the night, but during the day, it's raptor territory. So they sit and wait, not knowing what to do. Daylight comes, and so do the raptors. They pound on every side of the building. The walls eventually collapse, and in come the raptors.
This would have been a perfect scene for the movie, but they left it out. In fact, the only scene from the book that they put in the movie was the trailer dangling from the cliff.
The only good scene in this movie is when the raptors are chasing our heroes in the tall grass. I thought this was brilliant, but unfortunately, they just screwed everything else up.
Honestly, this movie could have been truly great had they stuck to the book. But they chose to replace all the good characters with bad ones, replace all the perfect scenes with crap, and completely throw out anything else good. They also made something's just awkward. Example, in the book the black girl was a student who snuck on board with a black boy. In the movie, the black girl is Malcolm's adopted daughter. Now, I don't want to sound racist or anything, because I'm not, but this is just awkward. And filmmakers don't need awkwardness in their movies. They could have kept both black kids in the movie. In fact, it would have made it better that way. But I don't have a damn clue where they got the idea to make her his daughter.
Normally, I wouldn't care if the writers and directors stuck to the book or not, but The Lost World was TAILOR MADE to be a movie, and it's a real shame they didn't see it through. The movie isn't all bad. It is kind of fun. But it is just so disappointing because this movie could have worked out much better. I don't know what Spielberg was thinking. Jeff Goldblum cannot carry a whole movie, he simply can't, and Spielberg should have known this.
Rating: 5/10
PS: There is a nice blooper I want to point out. When the poachers are hunting some dinosaurs in a field, and the good guys (Malcolm, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, and the girl Kelly) are looking over a cliff at the field, if you look closely, Malcolm grabs the girl's ass. It's hilarious.