In 1993 Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park and ushered in the era of computer animation. The movie went on to break records with no small help from a certain dinosaur junkie who is now known to you as Dr. Psy Chosis. I personally attended showings of Jurassic on 5 separate occasions, once even forcing myself to sit through that total waste of time and cash called The Flintstones just because Jurassic was playing with it on a double bill.

Walking away from one showing I remarked to my parents (I had dragged them to the theater) that this movie needed a sequel. No, not needed, disserved a sequel were my exact words.

Four years later someone at Universal thought so to.

So here we have The Lost World. While its not as bad as most (re: Roger Ebert) would have you believe it certainly isn't up to snuff when compared with the original.

Opening 4 years after the events in Jurassic the movie gets off to a good start with a British family stumbling on a island 90 miles south of Jurassic Park. They eat lunch on the beach until they're annoying little daughter is chomped on by a pack (flock) of little bird like dinosaurs called Compys.

Meanwhile, in the fall out from the "incident", we discover that John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has lost control of his own company. Sumoning Ian Malcolm (Jeff Invasion of the Body Snatchers Goldblume) Hammond confides in Malcolm that there is another island, the island our British family accidentally stumbled on to, where Jurassic Park's dinosaurs where actually bread before being moved to the actual Park. A storm wiped out the controls on that island and the animals have been running free for years.

Right there is my first complaint. If the animals where bread on Isla Sorna (as the island is called) the what was the genetics lab in Jurassic Park? Was that just for show? What about that incubator? The movie avoid answering these questions by completely failing to bring them up.

Since all company's are greedy Hamond's former company, InGen, wants to take the creatures off the island and display them in San Diego. Hammond on the other hand feels that they should be kept right where they are and wants to use public opinion to sway the world to his position. In order to do that he needs to know just what is on that island, so he sends Malcolm, Malcolm's girl friend and predator specialist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), electronics whiz Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), and photographer Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn). Since there has to be a kid in the movie for some reason Malcolm's daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) tags along.

Things get even more complex when a second team, sent to capture animals and take them to San Diego, lands on the island. Much running, driving, shooting, and people eating fallows. Especially when a mating pair of T-rex's shows up.

I'll start with the acting as aposed to my usual hinaking of the story. Jeff Goldblume is at his usual best so there's not much to complain about here.

Julianne Moore is competent. . .she's not good but she's competent.

Then there's Pete Postlethwaite, as Roland, our great white hunter.. He's hired by InGen to supervise the capture of the dinos, but all he really wants to do is hunt down a T-rex. Postlethwaite gives and admirable performance. But his chracter is sketched in. In one scene when he is asked "Dinosaurs come back for the first time in 65 million years and all you want to do is shoot them?" he replies something cryptic to the tune of, "You remember that chap who climbed Mt.Everest without oxygen? When he got down everybody asked him 'Why did you go up there to die?' He said 'I went up there to live.'" Its one of those lines that you just know they're some kind of hidden meaning  but I'll be damned if I know what it is.

The rest of the actors are just there to chew scenery and run the opposite direction from whatever carnivorous dino is currently on screen.

And they there's the story. If you haven't seen this movie you should just go back to the Crypt now because I'm about to give away plot points. For the rest of you I ask this: Was the T-rex's rampage in San Diego really necessary? It barely runs 20 minuets, does nothing for the plot, and isn't set up until halfway through the movie. The entire sequence seams tacked on and serves no other perpous then to have a T-rex run through San Diego. I suppose its justified since the T-rex is chasing after his baby, but it still feels like screenwriter David Koepp wrote it as an after thought.

Don't get me wrong: its a lot of fun to watch, but it seams as if screewriter David In fact the whole sequence reminds me of the 1960's British movie Gorgo. In that movie a giant dinosaur trashes a big city looking for its young. Here a regular size dinosaur runs around a city looking for its young. He doesn't exactly trash anything.

That's another reason why I don't particularly like this sequence. Since this movie was made for under $100 million so don't expect anything like Godzilla(1954) or Godzilla(1998). The most Rexie does is trash some cars, he mauls a city bus and eats some people. No fires, no explosions. There could have been a quite nice gun fight between the Rex and the SDPD but no, it was not to be.

The Lost World is what we in the business call an inferior sequel. Its not as good as the original, which wasn't exactly Casablanca ether. Then, as with now, characters are sketched in a best and Goldblume mumbles his lines most of the way through the movie.

But the movie does show just how far we have come in 4 years. If you look close you can see that the creatures are actually, physically interacting with the characters. Not just the big model dions, but the CGI dions. If nothing else it shows you how fast our technology is advancing.

So from a historical sense this is a pretty important movie. I had a reasonably fun time watching it, you might too. Just don't expect much. All the surprise at seeing actually, real-life dinosaurs (as we saw with Jurassic Park has long sense warn off. Oh well.

RATING(OUT OF A POSSIBLE FIVE)

BETTER TECHNICALLY THEN THE ORIGINAL, BUT NOT AS GOOD ANYWHERE ELSE

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