The Lost World (Jurassic Park)
Four years after the collapse of Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm is summoned by the head of Ingen, Incorporated, John Hammond. The company is on the verge of filing chapter eleven and Hammond's nephew, Peter Ludlow--now in charge of the company--wants to exploit the Ingen's only remaining resource to save the company from bankruptcy. Unknown to anyone outside the company, Ingen had a "Site B" where the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park were actually birthed. For four years dinosaurs have been flourishing on the island. After a career as a rampant opportunist, Hammond has become a naturalist and now believes that the dinosaurs should be left alone. To this end, he want to send a four-person expedition onto the island to do a non-invasive survey. Hammond then intends to use this survey to inspire public opinion and force Ingen to keep its greed-driven paws off Site B. At first, Malcolm refuses to go. He attended the last dinosaur disaster and has no need to experience another. Unfortunately, Hammond drafted Malcolm's girlfriend for the mission as well and she is already on the island. Sarah Harding is a paleontologist and couldn't wait to go. Frantic, Malcom demands that the expedition leave immediately. In short order the team locates Harding but Ludlow soon arrives as well to capture some dinosaurs for an zoo that Ingen intends to operate in San Diego. Of course, havoc ensues as T. Rexes and Veloci-raptors snack on humans. Eventually though, everyone is airlifted to safety. Ludlow's great white hunter even manages to bag a T. Rex. Then the boat carrying the T. Rex crashes into the dock at San Diego with the crew all dead. The T. Rex. escapes, chomps on the citizens of San Diego for a time, is eventually recaptured and taken back to Site B and all is well. (Maybe.)
Brash Reflections
Net and I and Lizzie all went to see the movie with Charles and Jenetta Gragg. These are our collective reactions.
Obviously, the whole point of this movie was to have dinosaurs stomping around and eating people. And--as usual with Hollywood--the visual effects in this movie are amazing. (The only problem I saw was whenever the dinosaurs hopped onto something or hopped off something, they seemed to float a bit. It just didn't quite look right to me.) And--as usual with visual effects movies in Hollywood--the plot was not exactly engaging . . . just one dino incident strung together with another until the movie quits.
There were lots of little oddities in the character motivations and actions. For instance, there's a photographer in the four-person expedition. Except, when he first sees the dinos he stands there and stares. Most photographers I know would have snapped for their cameras the instant the dino appears. It's an instinctive response. Good photographers "see" with their cameras. And then the guy jumps up onto a log formation and Harding--the red-headed paleontologist stands just a few feet away and he doesn't see her!
And speaking of Harding, she sneaks up to get a photo, the camera starts rewinding, the dinos get spooked and she run into the pack. How smart is this?!
I could go on and snicker about the about-face that the great white hunter makes at the end of the movie along with the other one-dimensional characterizations but it was an action-adventure/visual-effects-predominant movie and they aren't known for incredible characterizations in the first place so . . .
I was not impressed with the vehicles brought in by the four-person expedition. In the first place, the have camo-paint but it's shiny! Does this seem like a good idea? And the big trailer unit has thick bars over the windows and a flimsy trailer-home door? Seems to me that the whole idea of this unit is to protect people from large beast and you would want to re-enforce that baby with a completely enclosed cage (or at least some portion of it) even if you would only get five gallons to the mile!
And then there's the whole trailer off the cliff scene. The entire time I watched this scene I was thinking WHIRL, WHIRL, DIETS, WHIRL, DIETS, DIETS, DIETS. Just a few of the minor points: Why park next to a cliff? Why does the trailer have real glass instead of safety glass. Better yet, why doesn't the trailer have two-inch thick Lucite? How could Harding slide down the rope like she did and not sustain incredibly painful rope burns? Why didn't anyone tell her to lie back down when the glass was breaking underneath her?! (Think about it: Harding falls onto the non-safety glass at the "bottom" of the trailer. The glass cracks. She gets up on her hands and knees. In other words, she had concentrated the pressure of her weight into four small points. This is not a good idea. Not surprisingly, the glass begins to crack. Malcolm--chaos theorist and all around genius that he is--can't figure out that the reason that the glass is cracking is because she has concentrated her weight?! If she had eased herself back down and "swam" for the edge, everything would have been fine. There's lots of other minor problems with this scene but I'll leave the rest for you fellow nitpickers with the exception of one.
Imagine this scene: You have an RV with a long RV-like trailer. The trailer is hung off a cliff. A four wheel drive vehicle is winced to the front bumper of the RV attempting to keep it from going over the cliff. A rope that is not in line with the four-wheeler, the RV and the trailer is tied to a tree stump, travels through the broken out windshield of the RV, through the RV, through the trailer and finally reaches a trio of heroes who are dangling off the cliff underneath the trailer.
Now imagine that the entire conglomeration of vehicles goes down the cliff: trailer first, then RV, then four wheeler. In this scene, we see our trio of heroes suspended in the center of the trailer and RV as they race away. No way. No how. WOULDN'T HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE! In order for our heroes to be suspend in the center of the trailer, the rope would have to be attached to a boom that was swung out over the cliff so the rope would hang parallel to the face of the cliff, approximately four feet away. Otherwise, the edge is the rope will be constrained against the edge of the cliff as the vehicles go over and the vehicles would strip our hero right off the rope! (Which would be a bad thing!).
In addition . . . the vehicles are not going to go over that cliff in a nice straight line. They are going to twist and gyrate. In short, the heroes wouldn't stay in the center of the vehicles even with the rope attached to a boom and our heroes would be stripped off the rope.
And finally, what happened to the four-wheeler when the whole conglomeration went over the cliff?!?! That four-wheeler should have followed the RV off the side of the cliff and, once again, cleaned out heroes off the rope!
And why didn't the Rexs take a break from their attack during this scene. Why didn't they finish the job in the first place. Through out this movie, dinos seemed to disappear at the most convenient times.
And why didn't anybody think that maybe carrying around a jacket soaked in baby T.Rex blood was a Bad Thing?!? (I call this suspense-essential-stupidity.)
And did anyone else find it absolutely amazing that the raptors tore through a herd of hunters in no time but they seemed unable to kill our heroes?!?!
And how about the upper body strength of that Harding? She hanging off a roof with one arm, shuffling tiles with the other hand and she's not even breaking a sweat. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing but, to me at least, it just got a bit ridiculous.
I'm running out of time but a few other matters before I go:
Why did Ingen build it's facilities on Site B above ground?! This was a breeding station. Why not building them underground for minimal environmental impact. With a three foot steel door for an entrance hatch ain't no dinosaur gonna get through!
This is just a personal observation but I am growing more and more appalled at the cheapness of the news industry. The end of this movie features Bernard Shaw and CNN reporting on the dinosaurs. In other words, the creators gave this guy money and he pretended to read the news. Surprisingly enough, he sounded just as sincere when he read the fake news and when he reads the real news. In other words, this guy is willing to read anything if you give him the right amount of money?! Does anyone else agree with me that this undermines the foundation of trust and confidence in news anchors. Did Walter C. ever do this? (And the news people wonder why we don't trust them.)
And though I enjoyed the movie, I must say that I rolled my eyes at the "happy family scene" at the end. The camera shows us the T. Rexes frolicking on the plains and then pans over to show us a parade of other dinos trundling by them. So . . . I guess the T. Rexes had fed recently and the other dinos knew. (Stegosaurus checks his watch, "Let's see . . . um . . . Rexy ate Uncle Bob at three. It's five now. Yeah, I think we'll be okay. Let's have a parade!")
There's more but I leave it to you fellow nitpickers!
Reflections from the Guild
[Note from Phil: I have not verified these but they sounded good to me!]
Brian Phan, San Jose, CA: I thought this was a OK movie. It was not better than the first, I can tell you that. If they ended it at when Malcolm and his gang were leaving on the helicopter, I'd say it was too short. It was nice that they added the San Diego scene. I was caught up in the movie that I didn't watch out for the nits, but here are the very few I found.
Is the guy so dumb as to walk into a place with a T-Rex infant in it? That's what I'm asking.
In the beginning, Malcolm speaks with Hammond in his bedroom. Hammond has trouble getting up so he needs his cane. Yet just a few minutes later, he's walking OK without the cane!
So, in the end, all the dinosaurs are alive, huh? A few were some birds. Isn't it possible they might escape and fly to the mainland? (Note from Phil: Depends on how far the peridactyls can fly!)
Matt Thomas: I just saw the movie at a sneak preview last night, and I must say it is AWESOME! A couple problems, though. The biggest one I noticed was that in one scene Malcolm and another guy are talking about observing the dinos, and Ian says that you can't observe without changing because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Now, I thought the HUP said that there was no way to predict where in space a particular atom is at a given time. (Note from Phil: It does, but as I understand it, the reason that you can't know the position and velocity of a particular entity, like an electron, is that your efforts to observe the entity affect the entity and that distorts the results. I think . . . )
Joseph Pintar of New Hartford, NY: I just saw the Lost World: Jurassic Park. This movie makes Jurassic Park look tame by comparison. There are a few nits I caught.
I don't think they ever said during the movie what happened to the first park, but I do think it was destroyed (I read it in one of the publicity articles). In the original Jurassic Park novel, the park was bombed out of existence, which was not in the original movie. There is definitly some kind of translating the book to movie error here. Of course, there were a couple of scenes where two people were talking at once and I had to go to the bathroom at least twice during the movie(and I just had a "small" Coke during the movie), so maybe I missed it. Anyway, if they knew about the other island, why didn't they destroy it too (Answer: a billion dollars in box office gross plus merchandising)? (Note from Phil: If I recall, there was one line about destroying Jurassic Park and the feeling I got was that no one ever said anything about Site B.)
So the hunters want to take live dinosaurs back to San Diego. I find this idea illogical and unbelievable. Transporting all those dinosaurs to San Diego is both expensive, time consuming and not practical. Wouldn't U.S. customs stop this idea cold by not allowing them to import something as hazardous as dinosaurs onto U.S. shores? Also, I find it difficult to believe that these dinosaurs could be contained. At least on an island, if the dinosaurs did get loose, they couldn't hop on a ferry to the mainland. I just find the entire idea impractical.
After that thrilling trailer sequence, the hunter team shows up with Ian's daughter. Did she climb down from the tree? If I were her, I would be scared stiff and stay up in the tree (Of course, if I were her, I wouldn't be up in that tree or on the island to begin with.) That leads to another question, where did she hide during the trip to the island? (This is explained in the book, but not here. Another instance where they change the book but forget to correct for the mistake in the movie.) (Note from Phil: Given that the trailer is a mess when they arrive and Malcolm comments that it looks like her room, I felt like the creators dropped enough hints to suggest that she stowed away inside the trailer and ate the stored supplies.
During that velicraptor attack in the high grass, did anybody else hum the theme from Jaws?
So the T-rex rampages San Diego. What, not New York, LA, Washington, or some other place? I guess there are only so many times these cities can be destroyed, but San Diego is relatively unexciting place for a T-rex to rampage (My aplogies to anyone in San Diego. No offense.) I know Hollywood is looking for new cities to rampage (The TV movie Asteroid, for example, hit Dallas and Kansas City.), but I think they should stick to New York and LA. (Note from Phil: Wasn't Site B closest to San Diego and doesn't San Diego have a world-reknowned zoo?)
I wonder if Steven Spielberg intended the ship crashing into the dock and the T-rex attacking the bus to be in-joke references to the Speed and the upcoming Speed 2.
Michael Harrel: At one point in the movie, a boat carrying a T-rex in the cargo hold crashes onto a San Diego harbor. Everyone on board the boat has been killed and eaten, and the creators expect us to believe that the rex did it. Unfortunetely, some of the corpses are in a room the would be WAY too small for the rex to get in, and there is no evidence that the Tyrannosaur wrecked a wall or something to get in. I suspect that there are now velociraptors in San Diego! (Whoa, talk about setup for another sequel, huh?)
Myles Hildebrand: Just saw the Lost World and had to say: cool, but...
Okay, I know the ending is supposed to be a combo/tribute-to/rip-off-of Dracula's arrival in England and King Kong BUT- how did all those guys aboard ship die? If the T-rex was loose below decks, how could it kill the guys above decks? And if it was above decks and only got trapped at the end, why is the guy with the button dead? And how did it kill the cabin crew so that there's an arm dangling from the wheel? I was hoping for raptor stowaways but - it just doesn't make sense!
Bob Canada: Went to see The Lost World on Sunday (May 25)--had to buy tickets in advance and arrive at the theatre 45 minutes early (or so the ticket booth advised us). And it was on 3 screens! Man, these blockbusters are getting out of hand. Anyway, I enjoyed the movie, to an extent. The usual--short on plot, long on action. Wouldn't it be nice if just once they spent as much on the script as they did on the special effects? Character development was pretty much non-existant, especially among the "evil scientists." They were all a very non-descript bunch, until suddenly the story would focus on one, prompting me to think, "Oh, I see, this guy is one of the characters...(such as when the guy who wondered off to go to the bathroom and got attacked by the Compys--who the heck was he?)." I was mightily impressed with the dinosaurs though--dino technology has advanced exponentially in the last 3 years. Especially the last scene of the pteradactyl landing in the tree-that really blew me away. There was absolutely nothing artificial about that shot-it was absolutely perfect. Of course there were some nits...
I'm recalling these nits from memory, since I can't pause or rewind the movie, so some of them may be in error.
As the ship approaches Site B, Eddie tells Malcolm that the venom or poison in the dart gun "works faster than neurotransmitter velocity, so the dinos will be dead before they know they've been shot." Uh...I'm certainly no doctor, but did he just say the poison works faster than it works? How could a substance travel through your body faster than it could be transmitted?
When Malcolm enters the trailer lab to argue with his daughter Kelly, we see piles of candy wrappers, etc., all over the floor, indicating that this was where she'd been stowing away. Did no one ever once enter this trailer during the whole trip to check on any of the sensitive equipment, and see these obvious signs of human habitation?
When the T-Rex was sticking its nose through the tent, its head was touching the dirt. How did it get its giant head that close to the ground? Could a T-Rex really lay down on its belly (and then get back up with its useless forearms)?
I'm sure this will be the most submitted nit of the whole movie--what happened to the crew of the ship that was carrying the T-Rex? How was it they were all killed and half-eaten while the T-Rex was apparently in the ship's hold the whole time? As near as I could tell, the baby was never on the ship, so I don't think it killed anyone. Maybe one crewman walked down into the hold and was eaten. Another crewman heard his screams, and walked down to investigate, and was also eaten. Another crewman heard his screams, and so on and so on, until the entire crew marched down into the hold one by one. The guy steering the ship got so scared that he just exploded, leaving only a hand grasping the wheel...
So now that the captured T-Rex story is on CNN, EVERYONE knows the locations of Jurassic Park and Site B. How long will it be before some other corporation (Microsoft, perhaps?) mounts an expedition to capture some dinos, despite Hammond's inspiring fireside chat that these animals don't need us, and need us to step aside and leave them in peace. And would that ship really be sea-worthy, after plowing into the pier like that?
Aaron Nadler of New Cumberland, PA: There is a scene (if you havn't read the book) where 2 T-Rexes push a trailer over a cliff. In the process, one of the characters (Eddie Carr) jumps in through the smashed back window, and throws a rope down to Jeff Goldblum and Co. If you look when he first jumps in, there is a bookshelf with all of the books still on it, standing straight up, (LIKE THEY'VE BEEN GLUED DOWN) after to LARGE dinosaurs slammed this trailer at least 25 feet. Go figure.
Second, a T-Rex stomps through a suburban backyard, only to find that the pool doesn't ripple from his shaking steps. Also in the next scene, a kid looks out his window to see the dino, but the aquarium next to him doesn't ripple, either. (Note from Phil: Must be that super-firm San Diego soil!)
Ben Puntch: I don't know if you are going to nitpick "The Lost World," but if you do, I've got one for you. When the trailer first gets knocked over by the T-rex, a pane of glass falls out of the rear window of the trailer. However, when the trailer gets knocked over the cliff, the glass is back in the window so that Sarah can fall onto it! Anyway, thanks for listening to me rant.
Rob Orton: When Malcom is looking at the InGen helicoppters through the binocculars, he seems to be holding them backwards
Why were the velociraptors not attcking from the side instead of every direction. didn't Grant say in the first one that the raptors attack from the sides and in packs. come to think of it the raptors only hunted in pack in the feild and were actually attacking each other in the workers village.
Rob Levandowski of Rochester, NY: In one scene, the two trailers are hanging over a cliff, and the photographer is trying to save the others trapped in the trailer. He tries to connect the trailer to the winch of his Mercedes-Benz Jeep-wannabe, but the Benz starts to slide in the mud, so he hops in and guns it into reverse.
Now, the Benz is a stickshift -- we see him shift into reverse. Keep this in mind.
Since the car, when first slipping, is skidding -- the tires don't rotate -- we can presume that he put the parking brake on. Now, think about the procedure you'd have to do in order to pull this off: put your foot on the brake and clutch; start the car (if necessary), shift into reverse, unset the parking brake, take your foot off the brake, gun the gas, and let the clutch out.
Think carefully about those last three steps, and about the amount of weight pulling the car forward. At some point, the brakes are going to be off and the clutch is going to be disengaged. At that time, the wheels will spin freely, having neither brakes nor engine friction to stop them. It seems to me that the Benz would thus go flying off the cliff.
We then see him spin his tires. (Of course, this Benz has absolutely astounding tires to gain any purchase in this mud, rather than merely dig a rut.) He's weaving from side to side, -because the tires have lost friction with the ground- as they spin, making it possible for the vehicle to move sideways. Of course, if you lost friction with the ground, and you were tethered to an immovable object like a tree, you'd go side to side as shown. If you were tied to two trailers hanging precariously off a cliff and you lost friction with the ground... you'd go over the cliff.
A more realistic strategy would have been to attach the jeep to a sturdy tree or rock with chains, and then use the winch to pull up the trailer. I've seen off-road jeeps equipped with twin front-and-rear winches for this purpose. In a pinch, you could wrap the cable around a tree once before hooking it to the trailer, so that the tree takes the brunt of the weight.
Which reminds me: before doing all this, the photographer ties a rope (loosely) to a dead stump, so that he can throw it down to the others. The stump looks old and rotten. It wouldn't have been a good choice -- it looked as if it might crumble under the strain of the rope.
Also, the glass in the trailer window cracks under the woman's weight. When it cracks, and shatters, it doesn't appear to be safety glass. Seems strange that a trailer designed to withstand severe stresses, and attacks, wouldn't have safety glass windows. (Automotive safety glass has a sticky plastic sheet between two layers of glass, to help keep the glass "intact" even when broken, so that glass shards don't go flying around the interior of the car. Also, the glass is designed to shatter into many very tiny pieces, with minimal rough edges, to avoid cutting someone who hits the windshield in an accident.)
When the "great white hunter" fires his sabotaged gun, it clicks. There should have been a small popping noise from the primer of the gun. A cartridge bullet has a primer -- the small dot in the center of the back of the cartridge -- that makes a small explosion when struck. This explosion then ignites the main charge of gunpowder. The primers appeared to be intact when he opened the gun. (It would be difficult, and unwise, to attempt to remove the primer from the cartridge quickly with field tools.)
Too bad the trailer's phone system didn't have a speakerphone. (It did in the book.)
In the first movie, Ian Malcolm tells Dr. Grant that he has four children. Why does the one in this movie get special attention?
The hunters have a jeep with a passenger seat that extends on an outrigger. Jeeps are very tippy to begin with -- having an adult male in a carseat that far outside the wheelbase ought to make it prone to tipping with the slightest upset. Unless, of course, there's a large counterweight on the other side, which would make the vehicle that much slower. It seems like an unnecessarily complex design. (Note from Phil: But, of course, it *looks* cool! ;-)
Katrina Pipinis: Saw The Lost World -- was soooo disappointed. This is what I get for reading the book first. The book was better.
A T-Rex running around in San Diego (that's in California, right? I'm just trying to get my geography right -- which side of America is Costa Rica on East or West? They sure got to San Diego quickly, either way)? (Note from Phil: Costa Rica spans the small portion of land that connects Central and South American so it touches both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.)
Sure, it was great fun hearing "Daddy, there's a dinosaur in the back yard", but still.... I smell a tribute to King Kong with Rexy causing havoc wherever it went.
The Dinos were great (love those compys), but the characters didn't seem quite right to me (I think it was that this-is-what-I-get-for-reading-the-book-first syndrome).
Brian Bogovich, Pittsburgh PA: Hypothetical situation:
You are going on an expedition to an island inhabited by animals known to be violent, who are 50+ ft. high. You have no way of knowing how they would react to a change in their environment. Would YOU place your base of operations at the top of a cliff???
Shouldn't the ship carrying the Rex have sent out a distress call when the dinosaur started killing everyone?
[Aside from what killed the sailors on the ship,] the cargo bay doors are found partway open, because a hand from a dead body is pressing the button. There are problems with this.
1. what killed the man obviously not the tyrannosaur, because it would have had to be in the cargo area before the crew could close the doors
2. If he was dead, why was his hand still pushing the buttons? unless he was electrocuted, the crew member's muscles should have relaxed when he died, not contracted and held the button in place (I may be wrong about that, I'm not an anatomy student)
3. The hand was obviously plastic
Not a nit, an observation - didn't you expect to hear the crowd of frightened Japenese start shouting "Godzilla!"
Brian O'Marra, Little Rock, AR: I thought it was technically superior!! Very intense scenes throughout! I love the scene where Sarah is laying on the glass of the vehicle that is hanging off the cliff. The glass is cracking underneath!! Also, when the crew are running through the field, and you see the Velociraptors making lines in the field closing in!! Also, the Japanese tourists running away from the T-Rex in San Diego was a great tribute to Godzilla!! It was a hoot!!
On to the nits...First, not a nit but an observation, isn't it interesting how the first time the T-Rex makes an appearance in both movies, it's nighttime and it's raining.
I thought the scene with the Velociraptors and Malcolm and Sarah was a little too contrived. Sarah is hanging from the tiled roof, the one Velociraptor falls from the roof on to the other velociraptor down below. Sarah then falls right in front of them, and guess what? Both Velociraptors don't notice her!! These dinosaurs, who, supposedly work together (as the first movie brought out) now are fighting one another, just in time for Sarah to get away!!
I know that the stars of this movie are usually not going to be dinner, but there were too many scenes where these extremely intelligent, and very fast dinosaurs appeared to be a little deliberate, and a little dense!! They seem to continually allow our heroes to get away!!
Also, Sarah tells her crew that they're there for observation only, no interraction. Really?? Isn't this the same person who was just petting a baby Stegosaurus??
Finally, the last scene shows three Pterodactyls flying. Funny, as big as they are we never saw them throughout the whole movie!! Which brings up another question, why breed prehistoric birds on an island you're trying to quarantine from human contact? What's to stop them from flying off the island??
The scene where the ship carrying the T-Rex crashes in the dock lost me a little. Seems there should have been another scene to add a little missing continuity.
6/16/97 Update
Alexander Shearer: Though the establishing shots of downtown San Diego were nice, none
of the T-Rex's subsequent rampage is in San Diego (my friend tells me it's
Burbank). If it was San Diego, that would probably be the neighborhood where
I grew up, given the T-Rex's location.
BTW, San Diego would be a great place for a dino park. As noted in
the film, you have the San Diego Zoo (did they also mention Sea World and
the Wild Animal Park?).
Another mini rant: If you were sending people to an island full of
potentially dangerous critters like that, wouldn't you pack at least one
weapon which would absolutely, for sure, take one out? Maybe a LAW, or at
least a grenade launcher.
In the boat-into-dock scene: Why didn't at least one of the dock
operations people show some self-preservation? They all know that the ship
is racing towards the dock at full flank speed, not responding to
calls...why did they all just stand there?
In the waterfall scene (hiding from the T-Rex) the snakes slither
all over the "bad paleontologist" and then, after he becomes T-Rex chow,
completely ignore everyone else in the waterfall. Maybe they don't want to
overfeed the big guy?
M. Farahbakhshian: [Concerning, the dinosaur parade at the end of the movie,] Often savannah predators give signs that they are satiated
and mean simple to walk through...for instance, a cheetah will hold its
tail over its head, implying that it is not hungry or cannot run (a
cheetah needs its tail out as a rudder to run). Perhaps dinosaurs do
this as well in ways not easily discernable.
The reasoning for this is simple: for most predators, the urge to chase
is seperate from the urge to eat. This is why a dog plays fetch. As an
instinctive reaction (cf. Desmond Morris ,"The Human Animal") a predator
would waste a LOT of metabolic energy chasing any animal that flees in
its presence. Hence, the signals to avoid being lured into a deadly
chase. (Note from Phil: Hmmm.)
Scott Padulsky: Most of the nitpicks I had in mind were taken, but here's a few I
haven't seen:
I know its cold to think about it, but corporations are in business for
one purpose: to make profit. So here you have a bioengineering company
that has successfuly produced some of the greatests feats of genetic
engineering--feats that would make their stock go through the roof--and
they keep it a secret! I don't think so. The (fictional) engineering
techniques would have many uses besides just producing dinos, plus the
preteige (sp?) alone would make them a fortune. I doubt they would keep
it secret let alone dismiss Ian Malcolm when he tried to bring attention
to it.
Considering that Ingen got its source DNA from mosquitos trapped in
amber. I must say I'm surprised that they found DNA from so many
different species of dinos. I mean, mosquitos trapped in amber are
rare, plus these mosquitos had to have bitten a dino shortly before
being trapped, plus the DNA would have had to remain useful at least 65
million years (and for some of those dinos, longer than that). I can
accept five or six different species (i.e. the first movie) but not the
fifteen of so from this one. Then again, maybe prehistoric blood is
more common than I thought.
Lastly, since when was Hammond part of Ingen? I got the impression,
from the first movie, that Hammond built his fortune creating natural
attractions. He mentions that he started his career with a fleas circus
and also that he has a reserve in Kenya. I was under the impression
that Ingen was a sub-contract he used to make his dream of living
dinosaurs come true. Again maybe I'm off base.
Aaron Nadler of New Cumberland, PA: I've got a great line for you-
After all of the InGen party is killed by the Raptors, Malcom says, "We
should've stayed in the d*** car!" An homage to the lawyer Gennero in JP1!
Kevin Loughlin: It seems everyone has the biggies, but a few more comments are in
order...
Not only was the window not safety glass, but there were no bars! All
the side windows had 2-inch iron bars, but this back one is just plate
glass.
To your comment on the Mercedes Jeep(in that it didn't go over the edge
with the trailer): After the first trailer explosion, the jeep comes
flying and explodes with the rest of it. It's sailing through the air,
so it has a bit of an excuse for missing the guys on the rope.
The Rex was stored on-deck, as you can see the remains of the cage they
had it in on the island sitting there. The way it seems to have worked
is, Rex breaks out of the cage, mangles most of the crew, including in
the control room(!?!), the remaining crew get him in the hold somehow
and just get the doors closed as they die. I'll leave the feasibility of
this up to you.
The Godzilla reference will go even further in the Japanese release.
I've heard that one of those tourists will get a line, to the effect of
'I came here to get AWAY from this!'
Disturbingly enough, I left the theater rather hungry...
Lisa Shock of Phoenix, AZ: I couldn't help thinking that Malcom, who was there in the first
film, should have brought a small automatic pistol. It seems kind
of silly that his expedition only had the one tranquilizer gun. If
I had been there before, and seen the velociraptors, I'd have a
small, waterproof gun with me at all times.
How did the ship make it in to port in San Diegoso accurately?
Sure, it came in too fast, but it landed precisely where it was
supposed to dock without any course corrections for hundreds of
miles. I grew up around boats,and this was a truly amazing feat.
Bob Sabatini: I only have two nits for this movie, first of all, I am a porfesonial
photographer (if selling four prints counts as profesonial) and I wanted
to confirm your comment. if that were me sent to be the photographer,
the camera would never leave my eyes, except for when changing film.
At the begining of the movie, Malcom says that three peopole died at "site
A" four years before. Let's see here, I rember at least four, possibly
five (my brain is fried because of the hot weather.) In case your brain
is fried worse, I rember the guy at the beginning, Dennis (the bad guy)
the computer guy, and the man who was eaten off the the toliet (that was
cool)
Eric Brasure: I'll make this quick. One word: tanks. There is no way a dinosaur is
going to knock over a tank. If the team really wanted to stay alive,
they would not have jeeps. Which is better: maneuverablilty or
protection?
Erin Hunt of High Point, NC: Why would the Rexs push the trailer *partway* over the cliff, walk away, then come come back? This is especially odd when you consider that T
Rexs were actually quite stupid!
Isn't it convenient that the photographer's dart gun got stuck just when
he needed it!
Sarah, Malcolm and the others took a big risk, setting those dinosaurs
free in the hunters' camp. Somebody could easily have gotten killed.
What if someone had been standing in front of the tent flap when that
Stegosaurus came charging through? What if someone had been standing
near that jeep when it exploded? What if the dinosaur with the battering
ram head had caught the guy it was chasing? Very, very, very
irresponsible of them. (Note from Phil: I thought so too but the guy was supposed to be from some kind of Earth First organization and they typically aren't known for their sensibilities. True story: One such organization just staged a "liberation" raid on a mink farm, setting 40,000 mink free to roam the night. The result: I believe 11,000 dead very shortly afterward because they don't know how to survive in the wild. The prospect for the rest: Very dim.)
I know the big game hunter was supposed to be a villian, but I just
didn't think he was that bad a guy. I didn't see anything terribly wrong
with him trying to "bag" a T Rex, and he was the smartest person in the
whole movie. Yes, he did allow Sarah to walk around with baby Rex blood
on her so that a T Rex would come to him, but this seemed more a case of
overconfidence than sheer callousness. Besides, the heroes were just as
bad in this regard (see above nit).
When the photographer guy first rescues the baby Rex, he calls it a
"her". Later, as they're pulling it out of the jeep in front of the
trailer, he calls it a "he".
Sarah has presumably been Malcolm's "steady" for a while now. Don't you
think that at some point, a conversation like this took place: Malcolm-
"So there we were, with the T Rex practically on top of us! We were
sitting there as still as can be, trying not to move or make a sound..."
Yet, when the T Rex appears outside the trailer window (with plenty of
forewarning), she immediately moves! Atleast she knew enough not to
scream.
At one point, Malcolm pauses for a moment, then says something like,
"Hold on. This is going to be bad." The trailer is then pushed over. How
did he know something was about to happen? Sounds like someone forgot to
put in a sound effect!
Loved the moment where Malcolm tries to get off that elevated platform
by climbing down a rope, but instead slides straight down with a splat.
But if the platform is in the treetops, too high for a T Rex to reach,
shouldn't he have been severely injured?
During a velociraptor attack, Sarah falls down several levels of floor,
or whatever it is she falling down, but still manages to roll out right
where Malcolm and that kid are.
Malcolm is one tough guy. He's the only character, besides the big game
hunter, who never shows any *real* panic, no matter what.
Why did the T Rex, in San Diego, chow down on that street lamp? Does it
think this edible?
I won't even mention the "how could the T Rex kill the crew of the ship"
nit, it's already been mentioned so many times. Suffice it to say that I
think they were setting themselves up for a possible sequel.
When baby Rex and daddy Rex (atleast, the big game hunter called it a
"buck") gave each other a look, then the baby Rex attacked Ludlow, was
anyone else imagining daddy Rex saying, "Good job, son! You'll be as
good as your old dad in no time!"?
There are too many Idiot Plot moments to list, but one example is, why
didn't the guy who was attacked by Compys try to climb a tree? And why
is it that when people in the movies get scared, they lose the ability
to walk?
I just had to laugh when, at the end, Hammond claims that dinosaurs
"need our absence to survive".
I don't buy this whole pseudo-environmental message about leaving the
dinosaurs (a.k.a "nature") alone or paying the price. With the exception
of the T Rex and a few others, I don't see how putting a dinosaur in a
zoo is much different from putting any other dangerous animal in a zoo.
Right here in North Carolina, we have a zoo that's held *many* dangerous
animals, including polar bears, lions and rhinos, for twenty years, and
in all that time there hasn't been a single mishap. Of course, we don't
have scriptwriters to provide us with "animal escapes" plot devices. :-)
Benjamin Knoll: In your Lost World debriefing you asked "Why park next to a cliff?" In the book, they parked a ways away from the cliff, and the two T-Rexes pushed them to the cliff. That's what it looked like happened in the movie, too.
What was with Malcom's kid? I looks like the only thing she did to advance
the story was that little gymnastic bit with the velociraptor. In the
book, there were two kids, neither of which were related to Malcom. An
african-american boy, and a caucasian girl. It looks like the movie
combined the two kids. And why is she so dark-skinned? If her mom was
african-american, and the dad (Malcom) was caucasian, shouldn't she have a
bit lighter complexion? If you get any free time, you should read the book, it was really good.
Brian Straight of Shawnee Kansas: Mrs. Sarah "if we so-much-as bend a blade of grass" Harding, fixes an injured T-Rex's leg, pets a baby Stegasaur, and completely changes how the T-Rex
preseves territory by dragging the baby's blood all over the island.
If the dinosaurs are breed on Site B, and then transported to the park
island, then why where we wathcing raptors hatch in the first movie?
In the first movie the raptor's skin was green, in this one they seemed to of
changed to desert-camoflauge.
So how long do we stare at strange noises at night, before we decide to run
away from a large cargo ship heading into the pier.
Everyone else asked it, so I will too, How did the ship's crew die?
InGen is very resoursive they managed to get the Merceds 4x4 before anybody
else! They won't be available until this fall.
Lisa Shock of Phoenix AZ: One more observation: Did you see Arold Schwartzenager's picture in the movie poster (at the video store) for "King Lear"?
Charles Wallace of Antioch, CA: Well, I saw the movie, and though I thought the characters were extremely one-dimensional, and the story line leaving some large enough gaps to parade
a T-Rex through, I LOVED the effects! I thought the dino parts were totally
excellent, even if the dinos actions weren't.
I've got two main nitpicks:
When the Raptor is on the shingle roof of the tool shed, shouldn't it
be attempting to attack Sarah Harding? It just seems to stand there and look
at her and hiss and growl. But it makes NO move what-so-ever to bite her
head off or attack or anything of the sort! It just stands there, looking
menacing, but acting docile.
The Jurassic Park: San Diego attraction was totally unbelieveable. It
was what, exactly? A stadium? That's what it looked like. A BIG stadium
with a open roof and enclosed box/room/whatever seats, like the press boxes
or luxury areas of a sports stadium. And the floor area of the arena was
VERY small in general. What were they planning to do with the dinosaurs?
Pull them around the ring like dogs on leashes? The dinosaurs had no room
to move around or interact or act as though in a natural environment. It was
just a stage to show them off on. AND - if the roof was open, what did the
builders and designers expect to do if they HAD captured pteradactyls? Just
put them on little swinging seats like canaries?
Charles Sylvia: Besides the one-dimensional stereotypical characters of this movie, I
think another problem of this movie was it's so likeness to the first
one. One of the reasons I didn't enjoy this movie so much is because
well, basically, I've seen this before. Both movies have a scene where
it is raining at night, something involving a vehicle, and a
tyrannosaurus attacking the vehicle. All in all I didn't really like
the movie that much, and I thought the ending scene with the
tyrannosaurus loose in San Francisco was ridiculous. But..yes, the
special effects were great.
Besides all the obvious nits everyone's submitted, there's one more
obvious nit that isn't up yet so I might was well send it in. Malcolm's
daughter, is basically..."useless" to the development of this movie. She
doesn't do anything except be an extra character there. The kids in the
first Jurassic Park actually had a purpose and made the movie fun. And
then...just to attempt to give this girl some sort of reason for
existing, they throw in this gymnastics thing. Which of course is
totally ridiculous. This girl has been scared to death for the whole
movie. She must be physically exhausted, yet somehow she musters up the
strength to pull off her fancy gymnastics move (on a bunch of metal bars
which are CONVENIENTALLY there and CONVENIENTALLY stable) and manages to
kick the dinosaur which must weigh much more than her through the wall.
Somehow this seems too far fetched.
And THEN...Sarah Harding, after managing to survive more than one close
encounter with a velociraptor, falls through the roof, hits a glass
light and rolls through some glass and then gets up outside and she's
fine. I think that she'd at least have broken some bones doing that.
One more thing :
I suppose this isn't a nit, but I wonder if predatory dinosaurs really
WOULD be so aggressive towards human beings if they were to encounter
them somehow. We are unlike anything they've ever seen before so I
wonder if they would consider us as prey. Another thing about Jurassic
Park is most of the behavior of the dinosaurs is open to all sorts of
nitpicking since nobody knows for sure how they really would behave.
For example, would a bunch of compys really be so aggressive and
relentlessly pursue a large prey relying on numbers. Probably not since
at the time the procompsognathus triassicus lived, which was the early
triassic period, there were no very large creatures anyway.
David Tayman: Someone mentioned something about characterization of characters not
being right. These might be some reasons:
In Jurassic Park (the book, not the movie) Dr. Hammond is eaten by
Compys at the end (a note about the compys: Supposedly, acoording to
the book, the compys carry a type of poison that acts a tranquilizer. When
Hammond is bitten in the book, he immediately becomes peaceful, loses
care, and falls asleep. In the LW move, that one guy going to relieve
himself was /covered/ with the little beasties, was bit several times, and
didn't seem to have any kind of reaction.)
Malcom isn't the current boyfriend of Harding in the book. They fell in
love once, and hadn't seen each other for at least a year.
The character of Malcom's daughter in the movie replaced two characters
from the LW book, a white girl named Kelly (no relation to Malcom), and a
black boy named Arby (again, no relation to Malcom. Just a colleage of
Kelly).
The first half of the book has a character (who doesn't appear in the
movie) called Levine trying to find Site B. In the movie, Hammond openly
tells Malcom at the beginning.
In the book, the Bad Guy is the person who hired Nedry (the guy who
stole the embryos in the first movie/book) named Dogdson. In the movie, he
is replaced by The Great White Hunter and his whole 'army'.
The entire T-Rex-get's-Loose-In-The-City-as-a-Godzilla-rip-off sequence
was /never/ in the book.
Jim Cadwell: This has to do with one of the dinosaurs--the mimentiosaurus. This is a
large sauropod-like dinosaur whose neck is longer than the rest of it's
body and tail. It is indeed a strange animal. My nit, however, has to do
with it's neck.
The mimentiosaur's vertibrae have long bony projections going backward
and attaching to the other vertibrae. This makes the mimentiosaur's neck
almost rigid. Real mimentiosaurs would stand in a grove, holding their
necks straight out and occasionally swinging them from side to side and
eating the tops of tree ferns. I saw mimentiosaurs in this film bending
their necks freeley and running around with the parasauroliphi when the
bad guys were chasing them.
Murray Leeder: My, my, my. I enjoyed this film, although it was nothing but a
clothesline on which to hang special effects and repetitive suspenseful
sequences. Rather a disappointment, if you ask me...
I was especially annoyed by the very presence of Malcolm's daughter.
Just what was she doing there? She played zero plot role... did they
really need an extra person to be scared?
None of the characters are particularly interesting. Malcolm was one of
the few interesting characters in the first film, yet he doesn't have
the opportunity to do ANYTHING in this film, save run around and yell
and issue dire warnings. Very disappointing.
A word on the direction... I had to remind myself at times that this
was directed by the same man who did the Indiana Jones movies, "Jaws",
"Close Encounters", "E.T."... and "Schindler's List"! It was done fairly
well... but not the Spielburg kind of well. (if you want to see a
thriller really done right, check out his highway-horror flick "Duel")
And why bother painting the work centre elaborately when tourists will
never see it?
Why name the character Harding? That was the name of the veteranarian
Hammond had working for him in the first book (and film)!
Cowboy paelantologist: "They have no reason to fear man." Nasty guy
with cattle prod: "Now IT does." (emphasis mine) WHO WROTE THIS!
Was I the only one who thoughts that the T-Rex eats dog sequence was in
honour of the Far Side cartoon "Rex Vs. Godzilla"?
6/23/97 Update
Murray Leeder: Also eaten in the first film was Muldoon, the hunter. Remember, his
last words were "Clever girl..." (that's five)
I've got to wonder. At times, it seems like Hammond has recreated the
"time of the dinosaurs", but he really hasn't. Bear in mind that the
creatures on this island should have been seperated by enormous
distances... both temporally and physically. But this isn't brought up
at all in the movies, or the books for that matter (at least not in the
first one, I haven't read the second).
Somehow I'd be a little more concerned if my daughter had just risked
her life to kick a dinosaur. But hey, that's me, and I'm no parent...
What's with those velociraptors? I thought they were pack hunters...
why did they start competing over food (and let the food escape in the
process! And you thought only humans were dumb in this film!)
Matthew Chiappardi of Hamilton, NJ: Gotta agree with you, while this movie may have been exciting, it's pretty much worthless. Our heads get used to the dino-bash mantra.
Spielberg is slumming here. However, I was never that impressed with
"Jurassic Park" either. Of course, the special effects were great, Jeff
Goldblum was great as usual, and kudos to Vince Vaughn for a great
breakthrough performance. Best of luck to him.
Now...the entire trailer on the cliff sequence was so unbelieveably
absurd. It's got DIETS written all over it, I mean these are people with
no special training to deal with a situation like this. I probably
would have died in about two seconds.
Why did everyone just stand around wide-eyed when the boat was coming
towards San Diego?
The scene where Malcolm's daughter is flipping around in the barn and
smashes into the Raptor killing it is pretty dumb as well. A Raptor has
got to have the mass of about a cow and a half. Can she really exert
that much force on it?
Speaking of Malcolm's daughter, this is anotther example of Spielberg's
sloppy pandering filmmaking here. Every character is drawn so
one-dimentionally. So often in these summer blockbuster films we set up
conflict and relationships with such potential that just fizzle away,
are ignored, or wraped up too neatly. Same deal with Malcolm and his
daughter. This was an opportunity for some great storytelling on
Spielberg's part (he does have the ability), Spielberg himself has an
adopted black daughter for whom he is never around because his work
lofts him all over the globe donating his life to films he directs.
Sound like a paralell to Malcolm and his daughter on some level? Looked
glossed over to me.
Also, Phil, your comments about Bernard Shaw are kind of silly. I'll
give you that television journalism is a pretty abysmal medium, but
there are some shining spots. CNN is one of them. Being a TV anchor is
of course a performance job, it's public speaking. He is always just
reading copy. His job is speak that copy with deadpan conviction. He
was given a role in a movie that is clearly 'make-believe' to do what he
does every day. Of course he's going to read the copy they give with
the same conviction he does on CNN everyday. IMO it doesn't hurt Shaw's
journalistic credibility to accept such a role. Infact it added a bit
of fun credibility to the film to have his trusted voice and image
there. It was just a fun goof, I don;t think it brings up any irony
about modern slanted reporting. Shaw's a great TV journalist.
Remember, however high a pedestal we put Walter Cronkite on, he's still
just a talking head like the rest of them :)
(Note from Phil: Well, first of all, I really can't say that I believe anything I see on the television news anymore because I have absolutely no confidence in the journalistic integrity of the medium. But on a larger scale--from my viewpoint at least--I see Shaw's duplitcity in this movie as a further corruption of the line between fantasy and reality. Everybody says that they know that this is just fantasy but the more I am a nitpicker the more I realize how much the human brain adopts as fact from fictional sources. The actual storyline may be shuttled off as fiction but the background material is often accepted verbatim. Consider the whole defibrillator sham. Here we have a situation where the collective consciousness of the American people is completely out of whack with reality. I find this profoundly disturbing and the situation is not an isolated phenomenon. Information is the very basis of our thought processes and our thought process form the basis of our perception of reality which in turn forms the basis of our behavior and collectively forms the basis of our society. Without sounding conspiratorial (and I am not a conspiracy theorist for reasons that will become clear in just a moment), if we as a society cannot clearly distinguish fact from fiction we are in a very dangerous place and we leave ourselves open to all manner of manipulation.
Less you think I'm an alarmist, I offer you some tidbits. There was a report on NPR several months ago on studies into the way the human brain stores memories. To their surprise, the researchers found that actual memories and false memories (i.e. watch you personally experience versus the fiction you view or read about) are stored exactly the same way! The brain does not differentiate in the storage technique used for real versus imagined experiences. Only on retreival does another portion of the brain signal that a given memory is fictional. Needless to say, it is then absolutely essential for that mechanism to work! If that mechanism breaks down--if a person allows themselves to believe "facts" that are based speculation or hearsay--the person involved has launched into a floating reality that may or may not have any moorings in the real world. (Personally, I often conduct interrogations of myself, "How do I know [whatever]?" to make some attempt to keep myself honest.)
As only one quick example, consider the whole conspiracy phenomenon. If you listen for any length of time to conspiracy radio, you hear people talking with absolute conviction about "extreme possibilities" and only when you listen closely do you hear the illusion break down. Example, (I don't listen to conspiracy radio that much but I was driving around one day) this guy is ranting about how the media has covered up all this amazing UFO, he says that there has even been a giant UFO over Phoenix and though there's been some local reporting, the national news networks have covered it all up. I'm thinking, "huh?!" This goes on for minute after minute until the host takes a call from a lady in Phoenix. He asks her if she has seen the big UFO. She expresses her utter frustration with the whole thing because she's a believer and she hasn't been able to spot it. Then the host asks if there's been any local news coverage and she says no! But the guest was still convinced that there was an amazing UFO siting in Pheonix. (He probably thought that she was a plant to discredit him.)
I don't have the time to discuss what I believe are the origins of the whole conspiracy phenomenon but, in short, I think it's directly related an eroding of the ability of the populace to distinguish fact from fiction and their willingness to accept soft data. (And I think television has played an immense role in this. That and . . . the INTERNET where anybody can say anything and at least some of it is believed as real information. I was appalled this year that my daughter could use any Internet source in her papers. She just had to list the URL and she could quote from it! ANY source! That's because the teachers have swallowed this idiotic notion that the Internet is a glorious place where research is easy and magical and always rings true.)
"Erosion of Reality" is a huge discussion and I don't have the time to go into here but it does have very important real world applications. If you can change the populace's perception of reality--and you do that by blurring the line between fact and the fiction you are attempting to peddle-- you can influence how they vote (anyone remember the scare tactics used during every election by both sides of the politcal aisle?). You can also influence what they buy (Oprah says that she's never going to eat another hamburger because of her fear of "Mad-Cow" disease and cattle prices drop). You can even influence how they behave.
This is why I am death on anything that blurs the line between hard data and fiction--including much of what is foisted on us as "science." "Such-and-such-a-thing causes cancer in laboratory animals." "Oh yeah, well how big of a dose did you give them and what were you determined to prove in the first place--before you started the experiement!" (And, I could go into lots of example of stuff like this!)
(Looking at the clock) Arrgh! No time, can't finish. Quickly, in my opinion, the news should be hard data with an little editorializing as possible. Just the facts. And newspeople should conduct themselves in such a way that people can have confidence in the fact that when they are behind that desk what they report is clean, hard data. I know, I know. Ain't gonna happen. But a guy can dream, can't he? Anyway, back to Matthew's comments. Sorry for the soap-boxing ;-)
It does bring up a nit, the field reporter talking over the video of
the ship carrying the T Rex refers back to Shaw as Bernard. I watch a
lot of CNN and every field reporter and co-anchor always refer to him as
Bernie.
All in all, "The Lost World" stunk. Of all the big hollywood
blockbusters this summer, I'm waiting for "Men in Black". That looks
like a lot of fun. Also, like you, I'm dreading "Batman and Robin".
John Reese: Many people have commented on the tributes to King Kong and Godzilla in
this movie. When my mother saw the movie, she was reminded of the old
Tarzan movies. Specifically, she noted the extreme callousness in the
reaction of the hunters to the deaths of their comrades. In the Tarzan
movies, it was common for a hapless native guide to fall off a cliff or be
eaten by a lion. At this, members of the expedition would pause for a
moment, say, "Poor devil!" and go on as if nothing had happened. Of
course, The Lost World took this callousness to new heights. ("Did you
find him?" "Only the parts they didn't like.")
Speaking of this and of character development, the Great White Hunter
showed visible regret at the end for the loss of one of his comrades.
Um...who was this person? Was it someone we were supposed to care about?
Guess I wasn't paying close enough attention.
I would be a little frustrated if I were Michael Crichton. When he wrote
Lost World, he altered the circumstances of the first novel in deference to
the movie (can you say "sell out"?). For instance, he brought Malcolm back
to life when he had died at the end of the first book. So what does
Spielburg do? He changed up the story AGAIN! I guess Michael Crichton is
crying all the way to the bank. (Note from Phil: Well . . . when the only standard by which something is judged a success is money . . .)
Bob Canada: One more quick Lost World nit--if Site B was built first, and was where
the dino-cloning technology was invented and perfected and that's where
the first batches of dinos were developed, then why wasn't it called
SITE A??? You don't name something B if you haven't built A yet. Me
think scriptwriter am from Bizarro-World.
Murray Leeder: Isn't it interesting that it's only raining at certain points, and
those points always correspond to scary things happening?
Brian Alan Smith of Columbia, Missouri: I agree with every single complaint thus far about the movie. :) My two cents:
Did it bother anyone else that, perhaps, the most memorable moment for the
big action theme of "Jurassic Park" (heard in the first movie when the
helicopter approached the island, and when the T-Rex attacked the
velociraptors at the end) was in the scene after Ian Malcolm left Dr.
Hammond? I mean, big, bombastic music for a scene in which an old man
counts on his fingers? C'mon!
And, my nominee for Greatest Lines Ever to be Unincluded in "The Lost
World" (since the Japanese tourist saying "I came to America to get away
from this!" apparently WILL be included): return to this exposition
scene:
Man 1: "Yes, but there's a problem. We'll have to go through
velociraptor territory."
Man 2: "Wait a minute. What's a velociraptor?"
The answer SHOULD have been:
Man 1: "It's a hook-clawed predator dinosaur about the size of a man.
You know...a raptor. Like the Toronto Raptor basketball team."
Man 2: "Oh, so THAT'S what those are!" (rest of crowd makes the
connection, and nods understandingly) "I don't think too many people ever
heard of a RAPTOR before...how'd they come up with THAT name?"
Man 1: "I don't know...maybe the owners got it out of a book, or a
documentary film...but we can talk about this later."
Because, with all the other in-jokes in this movie, I just wished
*someone* would take the time to bash a team that not only got its name
from a hit movie, but also failed to take the WHOLE name...since we
all know -- from the FIRST MOVIE! -- that "raptor" means "bird". Rant
over. :)
Kekoa Kaluhiokalani of Columbus, OH: First, you can see the cameraman (cameraperson?) in the scene between Ian
Malcolm and John Hammond. Towards the end of their conversation, John is
walking back to his bed and Ian's leaned up against a desk. The camera
zeroes in on a ring on Hammond's left hand. Right as that happens, if you
look on the nightstand by Hammond's hand, there's a small mirror and in that
mirror--oops!--you can see the StediCam operator's legs reflected.
When Nick carries the baby T-Rex into the trailer, you can see the
electrical cord that powers the little dino. Look under the T-Rex as it is
being carried to the examination table and you'll see a black cord. At
first I thought it was the Nick's belt or something hooked under the baby's
leg to keep it stable. On second look it was clearly a power cable. (I
could be wrong on this one.)
In the scene where Dieter is being chased by the compys: You can clearly
clearly clearly see the strings attatched the other greenery to give the
illusion of real creatures jumping over the ferns. Millions of bucks to
film and they couldn't take time to erase those strings in postproduction??
Finally, actually this one is a fun nit, because I think this one was
deliberate. In the final scene, when Ian, his daughter, and Sarah are
dozing on the couch--look very carefully at the television screen. But
don't watch the CNN broadcast, look at the hazy reflection of the people on
the couch on the screen's surface. You see Ian, Sarah, Ian's daughter, and
Steven Spielberg himself sitting between them all. He's is very clearly
defined by the hair, the beard, and the dark glasses. Kinda cute.
Charles Sylvia: Bob Sabatini pointed out a nit involving Malcolm saying that three
people died on the first island in the original Jurassic Park.
Actually, there weren't just four, there was five deaths that we know
about : the worker in the beginning, Dennis Nedry, the lawyer, the
raptor specialist, and the computer programmer who continuously says
"hold on to your butts."
Erin Hunt as well as a few other people asked why the tyrannosaurs would
push the two trailers partly off the cliff, go away, and then come back
to finish the job. Well, probably because they had their baby with
them. They probably pushed the trailer a little, then took the baby
back to the nest, and then came back to finish the job.
One last thing : I have a question to anyone who can answer it. There
has been great confusion around the whole Jurassic Park/Lost World book
to movie thingy. I never read the first Jurassic Park but I did see the
movie. I've heard that in the book Malcolm is killed by velociraptors
who break through metal bars on the ceiling and come down and eat him.
But then, the novel "The Lost World" featured Malcolm. So I guess the
novel, the Lost World, is a sequel to the movie, and NOT the book. But
then, I did read the Lost World, and it is completely different (and
better) than the movie. I've explained this before and I've heard
different reactions. Many people tell me that Malcolm did not die in the
first novel, but there is a scene where raptors break through bars and
badly injure him. I also heard that this particular part in the book is
rather mysterious and we are not told what happens after the raptors
break through but we assume they kill Malcolm. I really wonder what
Micheal Crichton's intent was. Did he mean to have Malcolm die in the
the book and then decide to include Malcolm in the Lost World because he
liked the movie better than his own book? Or did Malcolm just not die in
the book, or did Crichton rely on the mysteriousness of the wording so
it's up to speculation whether he died or not. (The obvious solution to
my question would be to actually READ the book myself, but since I can't
seem to find a copy I'll just rely on the next best source for
information, Nitcentral.) (Note from Phil: It's been too long since I read Jurrasic Park!)
Ben Jackson: In response to Bob Canada's theory of the toxin. He said it travels
faster than neurotransmitter velocity, meaning the nerves. It travels
throught the bloodstream and affects the body before the nerves can
transmit a message to the brain that something has puntured the skin. I
am just saying that, no, he did not say that the poison works faster
than it works, although, I don't think it could travel through the
bloodstream faster than a neurotransmission.
If I knew that there were DANGEROUS, MAN-EATING animals lurking around,
I wouldn't go off of the trail into the woods to go to the bathroom, or
walking on a game trail in the first place. (I am just assuming it was a
game trail)
You gotta hand it to General Motors (assuming that was a Corvette
Malcom was driving to get the Rex back to the boat. I'm not that good
with cars). I REEEEEEEEAAAAAAALY don't think a Corvette could crash
into a bunch of stuff (like driving through a wall, for example) and
still be able to out run an angry T-Rex male trying to get its baby
back, do you?
Schuyler Hauser: Besides the Schwarzenegger "King Lear" poster in the video store, there
was also a cardboard standup for "Tom Hanks in 'Typhoon Surprise'". I
couldn't catch what the other posters were, though.
As to the San Diego attack: Yes, the street scene was filmed in my town,
Burbank, California (and the credits list thank yous for Pasadena and
Arcadia, other LA suburbs). I was driving home one night and San
Fernando Boulevard was blocked off and there were very bright lights on.
My brother told me that he had gone down to see what was happening and
was told by a cop that it was for "The Lost World". You can see signs
with a stylized "B" on them for Burbank, and catch a glimpse of the
Media Center Mall and other shops along the street. The t-rex walks past
a street sign for "Cedar", but there is no Cedar street off that portion
of San Fernando.(It's further south, but perhaps they shot there another
night) I saw the movie at the AMC theater right off San Fernando - kind
of interesting to see a movie right where part of it was filmed.
Product placement: Aside from the Mercedes, anyone notice the
subtle-like-a-hammer plugs for Krakle candy bars and Nikon. Sarah even
says "Is that a Nikon?" And of course the giant Unocal 76 ball that
breaks off.
Our heroes must be made of titanium. They jump, fall, crash every which
way yet no one breaks a bone or even gets a sprain, and both Ian and
Sarah smash through glass with no severe cuts.
The daughter: Didn't the woman she was supposed to stay with do anything
when she didn't show up? Didn't anyone check the equipment for this top
secret mission for stowaways? (A spy for a competing company or a
reporter could have come along easily) The gymnastics bit was too corny
for words. Interesting how the kids for the first movie also popped in
for a second and then disappeared.
Hammond's bed has a series of IV bags hanging above it, but then he gets
up and walks over to the desk. What's the point of having IV bags if
they aren't hooked up to the patient?
For a couple, Sarah and Ian sure don't keep track of each other's
wherabouts. While we're at it, the "why didn't you save me from that
boring museum reception" speech of Sarah's is too cliche for words.
All in all, it didn't have even the bare threads of plot and character
that were in Jurassic Park, although the effects were terrific. One
final bit: the screenwriter, David Koepp, makes a cameo appearance in
the movie as "Unlucky B*stard".
Kurt Harbaugh: A good "I wonder if everyone in the theater was thinking this even though
they never said it" line: "I always wanted two men to fight over me!" (When
the two velociraptors are fighting over Harding.)
If you would like to add some comments,
drop me a note at chief@nitcentral.com.
Please put "The Lost World" in the Subject line and include your real
name, city and state (or province and county as the case may be) in the body
of the e-mail so I can give you credit if you are the first person to bring
up a particular nit. (Remember the legalese: Everything you submit becomes
mine and you grant me the right to use your name in any future publication
by me. I will do my best to give you credit if you are the first person to
submit a particular nit but I make no guarantees. And finally, due to the
volume of mail received at Nitpicker Central, your submission may or may
not be acknowledged. However, your submission will earn you a membership in the Nitpickers Guild if you are not already a member!)
Copyright 1997 by Phil Farrand. All Rights Reserved.