I saw it. It was worse than the book. Which was indeed, one of the worst books I have ever read.
The TV show was pretty good, too. With a couple of very hot chicks…
Of the Spielberg movie, Roger Ebert observed that it fulfilled the critics’ dictum that, “whenever a movie features a gymnast, inevitably she will encounter a bar.”
The lost world is one of the few movies where not only does the bad guy get away with it, but nobody realizes he’s the bad guy. I’m off course referring to the douchebag environmentalist played by Vince Vaughn. No way did he not mean for all those people to die. Psychotic bastard.
The same thing applies when a movie features alcoholics.
I agree. I hated the book, and was actually glad they didn’t follow it too closely in the movie.
But the movie they did make still sucked.
Although I thought the 1960 Lost World was great when I was 5, I’ve since thought better of it, especially after reading the book several times (and especially the Annotated version).
The 1925 silent flick was great. I especially recommend the restored version, which is more than 90% complete. The usual version is something like 70% complete, and the immense gaps make it difficult to follow properly.
I hated the Spielberg movie, and never read the Crichton book. Nifty effects, though. And I loved the homage to King Kong.
No, no, no! Time travel is impossible. What they did was travel to a different universe through the quantum foam. They just find a universe that is a little behind our time line.
Now how the glasses and note got from that alternate universe to 600 years ago in our universe is so simple a process that there is no need to explain it all, just move along, nothing to see here.
On the other hand, TLW did introduce me to Richard Schiff. I’ve always enjoyed the thought that, somehow, that meant that TLW was the first stone of a long road that led me to “The West Wing.” And that makes TLW awesome. Sorta. Somehow.
Okay, I admit, the logic doesn’t really work when I write it out. But still - that’s the movie where Toby totally gets eaten by tyrannosaurs!!!
Jabootu’s take on it. There’s a lot to hate there. In particular, what annoys me is that essentially all of the problems the characters experience are caused by Nick the Environmentalist Photographer, who opens the cages of the trapped dinos. The ensuing chaos causes death and equipment destruction, which makes the trip to the island interior necessary, which leads to even more deaths. And we’re supposed to overlook that, because His Motives Were Pure. The “Designated Heroes” actually cause all the deaths; I think we weren’t supposed to notice.
Hence my comment about the bad guys winning. Nick - Vince Vaughn, before he was funny - was clearly the film’s villain.
It actually took me several years to realize that Richard Schiff with a beardwas the same actor as Richard Schiff without a beard.
One thing stopping the films from mirroring the books (for good or bad) is that in the books, people shoot dinosaurs all the time. They hit them with bullets and poison darts. I remember a scene where a raptor gets shot in the mouth by a poison dart and foams at the mouth.
But in the films, either Spielberg or Universal or the MPAA makes sure that no one ever, ever, shoots at a dinosaur and actually hits it. This means that the heroes can only run around and scream; they can never really fight back.
Think about it. Can you name a moment when someone shoots a dino? In the second film, our heroes hit the T Rex with a tranquilizer dart, but that’s as close as anyone ever gets to killing one. Is it some kind of animal cruelty thing? Because the dinos sure seem cruel to humans.
This particularly becomes a problem in the second film. I always though that Jurassic Park should follow the* Alien* films: in the first movie, it’s one or a few monsters against totally unprepared heroes. But in the next movie, the heroes are totally ready. They’re space marines with grenades, flame throwers, everything.
The Lost World tries that paradigm by sending “the other team” full of armed mercenaries, but they do nothing. When Dieter is attacked by compies, his rifle is nowhere to be found (he splashes water at them, for FSM’s sake). And when the T Rex actually invades the camp full of armed soldiers, they just run – and one guy shoots his machine gun in the air, never hitting it.
As you can see, I’ve probably thought way too much about this. Anyway, there’s just one more reason why The Lost World sucks.
I think part of it, to be honest, is Spielberg’s growing anti-gun bias as he gets older. There seems to be a rule now that no one in any Spielberg movie shall be shown using a gun effectively. But for his WWII movies, the last time I can think of it happening was in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The compy thing was another sore point in the article I linked. So, a little girl is swarmed by compys at the beginning, but we’re told she’s okay. A grown-ass man, however, is attacked by compys, and he’s slain in seconds. Yep, sounds plausible…
He angered the compys by electrocuting one. He made them hunger for revenge
In The Last Crusade, Indy kills seven with one blow with that German Uberpistol. And the Nazis do a pretty good job shooting and grenading the protectors of the Grail just prior to that.
I just try to focus on the dinosaurs. That was really the only way I was able to watch JP3 at all.
I like JP3. I think they got it right; that they ought to be about rampaging dinosaurs chasing and eating people, and not about some eco-friendly sciencey bullshit. They had a decent story to push the adventure along, and the characters were likeable even when they were being stupid and annoying. It’s the one I re-watch most often.
I agree - but only because the movie took fewer minutes out of my life than the book did.
In JP I, consider all the people Spielberg let live who died in the book.
I think Indy could be shelved with the WW2 movieS (why the S? I’m sure you’re referencing Private Ryan, I doubt you’re thinking of Empire of the Sun. So that would be WW2 movie, singular.). Obviously you havent seen Munich, which has lots of guns being shot and killings (in addition to explosives), and one of Speilberg’s best movies.
Speilberg probably separates in his mind the various kind of movies he makes. HE must have put Jurassic Park in the Scary but Kid-Friendly flicks (too bad, the original book is infintely superior to what the film ended up being. One of the few higlights in Crichton’s hack writer career).
You forgot 1941.
Although more seriously, he was also the producer or executive producer on Band of Brothers, Flags of our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, and The Pacific.
And, of course, there’s Schindler’s List, but that’s not really a war movie in any meaningful sense. Point is, dude does a lot of stuff set between 1939 and 1945.