The Lost World

I read the ”The Lost World” novel 27 years ago, when I was 13, and thought it was kind of ”meh”. For the first time, I just re-read it, and was suprised at how darned good it was.

THE GOOD

• Overall exciting plot without resorting to too many lame tricks, such as gratuitous violence or contrived twists. I don’t think a single person dies in the first 2/3.

• Solid overall premise, that there’s a second island that worked as the ”factory” for the dinosaurs. I remember that I used to think that this premise was far-fetched, because there was no hint of it in the first novel. However, the first novel makes it pretty clear that the visitors are show a somewhat fake, tidied up version of things.

• The characters are actually pretty decent. I’m usually in the camp that think that Crichton can’t write characters for shit, but I guess he improved or something, because I find myself not being bothered this time, unlike when I read about soulless-and-acts-like-a-machine Grant.

• The dinosaurs generally make sense. By and large, they are consistent with the first novel, as well as with the fossile record and with how modern animals act. I wasn’t sure what to think of the super-camouflaged Carnotauruses at first, but I’ve decided that they’re neat. (It seems that Crichton has a thing for inventing crazy hunting strategies for dinosaurs with weak jaws — venom for Dilophosaurus, and camoflage for Carnotaurus).

• The character motivations also make sense. One could see why an oddball like Levine would go to such and island, why his companions come to rescue him, why the kids tag along, and why Dodgson does what he does.

• The techno-philosophizing was nice this time again. It gave me some aha moments, just as it should.

THE BAD

• All the action of the third half bored me a bit. After a while I found it a bit tedious to read for the umpteenth time how a raptor almost kills somebody and they are saved just in the nick of time of a deux ex Kelly shooting it with a rifle, or something. I think they could have trimmed this.

• Some things don’t make a lot of sense to me. For example, Dodgson means to locate all the nests, to steal fertilized eggs. But surely most nest-building animal populations don’t have nests all the time? Did he luck out and come to the island in the beginning of dinosaur breeding season, or something?

• What happened to the raptors at the very end of the first novel who were roaming around the countryside, eating beans? A sequel should at least address those.

THE MAYBE

• T-rex humping a car and leaving a sticky white fluid. I genuinely can’t decide if I hate or love that.

• Many story beats are outright stolen from the first novel. Malcolm gets attacked by a T-rex and has to spend the finale drugged up on morphine. A kid sitting by a computer saves the day. And so on. This isn’t necessarily bad… But maybe.

FINAL WORDS

• I wish the moviel would have followed this novel more closely, and highly recommend it.

• My favourite scene is when a guy is rushing to a boat, but has to stop his car because a flock of Pachycephalosauruses is blocking the road. He can’t drive through them or walk past them, because they headbutt him or his car if he tries. His frustration is tangible.

I've just finished rereading both of the original novels for the first time in probably ten or so years, and I had some thoughts I wanted to share, and hopefully start a discussion in the process.

To start off, I see people (and I'm sure I've done it as well) complaining about how much Spielberg changed from the novel or just didn't use, but after rereading the novel, I totally get it.

The novel has very little to do with actual dinosaurs until somewhere around 2/3s of the way through it. With the exception of a couple of very quick passages not having any interaction with live dinosaurs at all, or merely commenting on their behavior or having characters watch them over a camera network, or from the high hide.

This doesn't work for a movie, we already had Jurassic Park, we've felt the "wonder" of the the dinosaurs existence and relying on that trick to draw us in and then shut off the dinosaur stuff for an hour wouldn't work for the sequel like it did for the original.

There are only five human kills in the book, and four of them are characters you don't really care for, the one you do care for is killed off in one sentence.

Malcolm is even more preachy this time around, but this time, hes got Levine who is also just as preachy, and their opposing viewpoints are the major feature of nearly 3/4 of the book. Them just explaining and arguing evolution. It is interesting, but it would not make for a good film.

I don't think audiences would have enjoyed a more faithful version of TLW, because everything that happens in the book, happens in the last thirty or so minutes of a movie with not much prior buildup, stuff just goes wrong because it needs to go wrong or Malcolm would be wrong and Malcolm can't be wrong.

The book did have some more interesting plot lines in my opinion. Stuff like the prion disease, the slovenly, violent raptors (especially when compared to JP's wild raptors being extremely attentive parents).

I think the larger Ingen expedition from the movie was a good change for a movie, it allowed a "reuse" of the original wonder scene from JP, this time with the vehicles moving through the herd, and allowed us to sympathize with the animals, something the book does not do.

The Tyrannosaur trailer scenes are largely similar but Sarah and the glass window was a great addition from Spielberg. I also think the Tyrannosaurs continuing to stalk the expedition was kind of contrived, because someone as experienced as Sarah Harding would 100% realize she needed to ditch her jacket after coming to the realization that by moving the infant tyrannosaur, they had redefined the Tyrannosaurs perceived ranges. That was just added in to have an excuse for the Rex attack on the sleeping hunters, and to then have Tembo tranq it for the climatic San Diego scenes.

Speaking of, Roland Tembo is an awesome character, probably the most interesting in the movie.

Nick Van Owen is a terrible character, and is the reason for basically every human death in the movie up until his exit from it.

The raptors in the field scene is iconic and was a good addition. The stuff that came next, wasn't as much, I get that it was an attempt to do something similar to the novel, but it came off a little goofy.

I'm not a huge fan of the Rex in San Diego stuff, its another case of "Malcolm needs to be right, so make the story make Malcolm right", and I would have rather seen the Carnos from the novel replace the Tyrannosaur in the canyon, invisible carnos killing hunters in the night would have been an awesome scene, and you could end with a reformatted version of the raptors in the workers village scene we got, but draw it out and make it less pulpy action, more survival horror.

I do really enjoy TLW movie, its maybe my favorite in the franchise, but it could have been better. If it had followed the book, it possibly could have been much worse too.

TLDR: The Lost World novel wouldn't make a good movie, Spielberg did some strange stuff, somewhere in the middle is a better movie.