Sequel missing 'jurassic' spark - The Lost World: Jurassic Park Reviews

The premise of THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK II is that, unbeknownst to us at the end of the first movie, there was a second island off the coast of Costa Rica where dinosaurs roam. This was, in fact, the factory ? if you will ? where the star attractions of the amusement park featured in the first film were manufactured. It has remained a ?lost world? for four years. But now, corporate differences between the creator and operators of the dinosaur park make it impossible to keep the secret any longer. The creator sends Jeff Goldblum & co. to make scientific observations of the way life has found its way without human intervention. But, the operators have something else in mind: It?s not too long before the prehistoric paradise is over-run with game hunters and poachers who plan to make sport out of the most astonishing creatures on the face of the earth. When the research team stumbles upon a caravan of colossal creatures ? in this case, a herd of stegosauruses ? they are overwhelmed by the majesty of the beasts. ?Ooh, aah. That?s how it always starts,? mocks the irreverent Goldblum. In fact, the scene is a carbon copy of the scene in the first movie in which we get our first spectacular glimpse of the awesome fauna of the place. Unfortunately, however, we soon find out that the entire sequel is not much more than a formulaic re-thread of the types of sequences that worked out well in the first film. If this film were the basis for our understanding of dinosaurs, we would think that tyrannosauruses really liked throwing vehicles over cliffs, and that velociraptors liked to build up suspense in elaborate sets before making their kills. Oh, yeah, and whenever the T-Rex gets caught before a breath-taking backdrop, he is wont to roar. In fact, the scenes in The Lost World involving these two admittedly photogenic species are carbon copies of similar (albeit, memorable) sequences in the first film. Clearly, in a film like this, the dinosaurs are the feature attraction. So much so, that one almost feels silly complaining about the human characters? lack of depth. But, in THE LOST WORLD, the film-makers spend so much time trying to convince us that the people are full-fledged that they make it necessary for us to note how badly they have failed. The attempts to make the characters compelling are so pathetic and half-baked that I found myself thinking, ?Come on, Director. Just get back to the dinosaurs.? Early in the film, we find out that Jeff Goldblum has an African-American daughter. No explanation for this is given, and we can only suppose that this is to establish how progressive and out of the mainstream his character really is. Unfortunately, though, such a characterization smacks so much of the formulaic, politically-correct fluff we get in so many pictures, that this turns out to water down the character, and not give him any edge. The bad guys in the movie are the usual, stock villains that we have seen in every B-rate picture ever made. Perhaps, film-makers assume that we know these mass-produced caricatures so well that we would never question what rock they crawled under from. Thus, when it happens, we neither grieve nor really rejoice in the poetic justice of it all. We are only left with an empty feeling, a grieving, as it were, but for the short-comings of human imagination. And, that?s all there?s to it. Nothing else. If you like dinosaur movies, rent JURASSIC PARK. (Carlos Colorado)