Steven Spielberg's Worst Film?

Rating: 3/10 (10 October 2000)

Steven Spielberg is my favorite director. I have loved almost everything he has done, so I can be quite critical of his "disappointments." I think I disliked "Hook" more than this movie, but "Hook" wasn't pretending to be anything more than a kid's film. I didn't have a problem with "1941," which wasn't great, but I didn't think it was the huge bomb that many people did.
The reason that "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" could be Steven Spielberg's worst film is because it plays more like a Steven Spielberg rip-off than it does as one of his own films. One of the things that the director is most skilled at is inferring things, giving us haunting foreshadowing that will get us lost in the fantasy of his stories. Examples of this include: the opening scene of "Jurassic Park," where we cautiously await loading of a raptor to it's holding pen, that turns to horrifying disaster, without ever really "showing" it; the opening of "Saving Private Ryan," where we sit with the soldiers in a higgins boat, hearing distant sounds of explosions, knowing that immense slaughter is approaching; many instances in "JAWS," where the IDEA of a shark is described and presented without ever SHOWING it.
In "TLW:JP," there are countless times where we move to an extreme close-up of Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), where he realizes that something is wrong, and says something like, "Run... as fast as you can," while we are supposed to anticipate something. We don't. Nothing more than we have already seen, anyway. When the group of hunters are trying to escape the island, there is a moment when they realize a certain danger they will face. "Raptors," a character says, followed by an echo of their growls; No chill down my spine. Almost every time the movie tries to instill fear and fantasy inside us it fails, as if it was directed by a novice movie maker who is trying to imitate Spielberg.
The movie also has huge plot holes and many unbelievable elements; a character who tries to be good, and "save" a T-Rex from death by replacing a hunters' bullets with tranquilizers is the main reason the animal later runs wild on the mainland. I didn't buy the "pack hunting" of the Compy's, and I didn't really like the scene where they kill a victim.
This isn't a horrible movie, and it does have it's moments, but none of them are spectacular. The special effects are very good, but they haven't improved much since the first movie (4 years before), and they aren't "groundbreaking" like they were in "JP." Pete Postlethwaite's "Roland Tembo," like "Muldoon" in JP is one of the two movies' best and most believable characters. He has the best story line, where he wants to hunt down a T-Rex. However, when the moment finally comes, it turns into a disappointing, wimpy climax. It could have been the greatest scene in the whole movie--how did Spielberg miss this opportunity? I think he wanted to save the T-Rex's best moments for the finale on the mainland. But the San Diego sequence, while "different" from the rest of the two movies, isn't very good.
I read the sometimes very talented Crichton's novel before this movie came out, and it was pretty bad--just a quick way for him to make a buck. It seems like Spielberg was unfortunately thinking the same thing this time, and directed the movie on autopilot. Grade: C-