Rooting For The Dinosaurs

Rating: 2/10 (1 November 2017)

The first "Jurassic Park" was all about the science of bringing dinosaurs back to life. "The Lost World" is about the ethics of same. Ethics have always been tricky territory where Hollywood is concerned. That's true here, too.
Four years after InGen populated an entire island with dinosaurs, the company finds itself on the ropes. Wrongful death suits are expensive; so is bad publicity. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) goes from horrified onlooker to potential hors d'oeuvre when he travels to Isla Sorna to persuade his paleontologist girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) to come back home with him.
Director Steven Spielberg called this film "my first pure sequel," noting his Indiana Jones films are more like installments in an adventure series. But "The Lost World" fails miserably as a sequel, offering none of the joy of discovery while doubling up on carnage. It is a weird, grim spectacle film where logic in thrown out and characterization reduced to the broadest strokes.
The question I am left with: Are we supposed to be rooting for the dinosaurs? The pro-forma good guys are a motley crew of SJWs whose constant virtue-signaling is about the only thing audible over the raptor roars. In between snuggling up to a baby stegosaurus and bringing an injured T. Rex into her trailer, Dr. Harding lectures a photographer not to smoke a cigarette on the island. "We're here to observe and document, not interact," she tells him.
Spielberg could have made a good movie out of this if he dispensed with the idea of making Harding his hero, rather than a big part of the problem. The photographer turns out to be a Greenpeace operative, and we watch him and Harding release some captured dinosaurs which then trample through a camp of fellow humans. They are hunters, so this is apparently positive behavior, even if this "ethical" sabotage winds up killing most of the people we see.
The CGI is more active here than it was in the first film, and much more artificial-looking. Spielberg's A-Team, composer John Williams and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, plod through the motions in delivering a lot of mood and odd triumphant tones which feel hollow even as they are delivered. The whole film fails as a transportive enterprise, reminding you of past glories while adding nothing new.
There's one performance I really liked in the film. It's not Pete Postlethwaite as Roland the hunter, which everyone else including Spielberg loved; he's a cipher too hemmed in by the silly script. Rather, it's Arliss Howard as Peter Ludlow, nephew of John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), who as acting head of InGen is trying to use the dinosaurs to repair his shattered business, and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.
Howard is so smoothly smug and mean, I found myself seeking him out in group scenes. He's really not much of a villain, since his motives are less evil than capitalist (the same thing in Spielberg's world, maybe, but not mine), but he adds the right notes of conflict whenever given the chance, like when Malcolm grabs his arm in an early scene to make a point: "This suit costs more than your education."
Howard doesn't do much villain work, so I was happily impressed enough to give him my 1997 Doe Avedon Award for great performance in a bad movie.
What passes for a plot involves watching the various name characters try to avoid the same brutal fate they bestow on those who meet them, and then try and save an angry T. Rex storming through San Diego. This latter piece is so tacked on it betrays "Lost World's" focus on being an effects film. The original "Jurassic Park" was that, too, but the storycraft was good enough to keep you watching.
No luck here. "The Lost World" is as much a slaughterhouse of ideas as it is of people. We can argue about whether Spielberg ever made a worse film ("1941," perhaps), but this stands supreme as his most disappointing.