Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Vince Vaughn, Peter Stormare, Richard Attenborough, Arliss Howard, Richard Schiff, Vanessa Lee Chester
Goldblum sets off to retrieve girlfriend Moore from a second dinosaur infested island.
Spielberg's follow up to his '93 smash is, for the most part, a lacklustre affair. There's no doubt that Spielberg helped make the movie business what it is today, but there has to be an alternative to the way this film was made. We are asked to believe that somehow a second island of rejuvenated monsters exists yet has remained undetected in the four years since the original incident. David Koepp's amateurish script relies on contrivances like Moore and Goldblum's romantic involvement and there's yet another of Spielberg's trademark annoying kids, Goldblum's daughter who smuggles herself along for the ride. Her character is forgotten about for most of the film and her only contribution to the narrative is a painfully cheesy scene where she uses her gymnastic skills to drop-kick a raptor. This loans absolutely no credibility to the film whatsoever. There's also a cheap gag about how Goldblum has a black daughter. Was this made in '97 or '37?
You would think the sequel would amp up the dino factor but there seems to be a lot less monster mayhem here than it's predecessor. The highlight of the movie is a stunning set-piece where our protagonists are trapped in a vehicle which is being pushed over a cliff edge by a pair of T-Rexes. Spielberg brilliantly uses slowly cracking glass the way Hitchcock used a tearing shirt sleeve at the climax of "Saboteur". There's another nice visual later featuring Raptors running through a field of long grass. These moments are too few though with most of the movie consisting of badly written arguments between scientists and hunters. 
As if Spielberg realised he needed a way of outdoing himself there's a climax which sees a T-Rex on the loose in San Diego. It feels tacked on and pushes the movie past a two hour running time, far too long for this sort of film. The sequence has too much of a studio shot look to it and never feels like a real city is under attack, much like the climactic battle of this year's smash hit "The Avengers". Fans of the director should check it out for a couple of skillfully constructed sequences but "The Lost World" feels too much like a movie struggling to justify it's existence.
6/10
