THE LOST WORLD Is Better Than JP3 - Page 2

The Lost World has a few great, great scenes plus Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Pete P, Stormare, Darkness, the cliff, the hunting scenes, etc.

JP3 has a great bird sequence but a kid who's almost as annoying as the shitty kid in the first movie. Plus Tea Leoni is some kind of boney, snotty monster herself. Such a grating and forgettable movie.

The Lost World is much, much better. I tend to think that people hate it because of their 1997 disappointment that it wasn't the first movie. Although the first movie sucks too.

Yeah, but Vaughn and Moore never get eaten by the dinos.

After the gymnastics scene, The Lost World squandered any good will it had built up.

But isn't that gymnastics scene better (or easier to overlook) than 90 minutes of Leoni?

Well, it is for me at least.

LW is by far the better of the two sequels for me.

We get to see twice as many dinos this time and it skips right ot the chase (pun intended). Most hate the ending in San Diego but I feel it's a better Godzilla film than the Devlin/Emmerich remake we got a year later. In fact I find myself watching it more than JP these days. Plus Pete Postlethwaite just rocks!

JP3 has a couple cool scenes: the aviary with the pterodactyls and the chase with the Spinosaurus. The T.Rex/ spino fight also wasn't as good as it could have been. I wished it was done on a more epic scale, like Richard Dickson suggested. Other than that the film felt rushed without any inspiration behind it and just felt bland. And yes, throw me in the crowd for hating Tea Leoni.

What would you guys think about a JP remake being done in twenty years but being closer to the book in tone? You know a more graphic, R-rated version.

Will the kids die?

Actually yeah, what really annoyed me was how in the three films we never got to see a human shoot a dinosaur. Hell, in the book Murdoch blew off a Raptor's leg with a shotgun. In the film he gets taken out like a punk. Damned Spielberg.

JP3 has that damn kid surviving alone on the island for two weeks like fucking MacGyver, as well as an ending that, well, isn't an ending.

Interesting note: had JP3 not run over in its shooting schedule, Macy was scheduled to be J. Jonah Jameson in "Spider-Man".

I love, love, love Macy, but I'm glad that didn't work out. I can't imagine anything better than Simmons. He was perfect.

Jurassic Park will always be in my top ten, since it is the single most memorable theater visit I'll ever had. I was 8 years old. Nothing will top that movie trip.

I do have a deep longing, though, that somebody will remake the film in a few decades and make it much more like the book. It wouldn't need to be the blockbuster the first was, but maybe just a more visceral, scarier flick that I could go see once. Even though I loved the sequel book, I don't ever need a remake of The Lost World, since The Lost World book is pretty much the exact same thing as the Jurassic Park book.

On topic, give me the Lost World movie every single time. The boat-to-America business is incredibly frustrating in how blatantly nonsensical and stupid it is, but other than that 5-minutes of screen time, I love the movie. I was young, and it really did scare me good. It was definitely a lot meaner. Eddie dying still gets me. I saw Jurassic Park III once in the theater and remember little about it. What was this ending eveyone hates? I forgot what happened.

Sam Neill gets ahold of Laura Dern, and Laura Dern apparently gets the whole U.S. military to come in at the last minute when the characters all make it to the beach.

There's so much changed from the book that I had a hard time enjoying it when I first saw it. It was almost like Speilberg going down the list of characters and changing most of who died to characters that live and vice versa. Not only does Muldoon go out like a bitch, Malcom and Hammond end up surviving and Gennaro goes from unlikely hero to dead lawyer joke. It's one of the few books that I wasn't able to overlook the changes in it's film version. Probably part of why I always liked Lost World more, besides the fact that i felt like a kid watching Saturday afternoon monster movies.

As for Deep Blue Sea, I love that piece of crap in the same way that I love Torque. I think Deep Blue Sea had every intention of being that ridiculous and was grinning and winking at the audience the entire time. How can you not love the scene with Samuel L Jackson's cliched big heroic speech? I think that scene alone shows you the non-serious, over the top vibe of the movie. It's almost a spoof. Worked for me.

Wow, you guys are tough with your man-eating dinosaur movies.

Perhaps, but I expected more from this film. A lot more. Then again, I expected more from the original film too. But its the unevenness of The Lost World that bugs me. That, and the pointless boring ending.

Damn, I feel old.

As a kid the Jurassic Park films are awe-inspiring. In retrospect, none of them hold up very well.

Jurassic Park -- the pacing ... ugh. The ending is a deus ex machina of ridiculous proportions.

Lost World -- the kid! Goldbloom is annoying.

JP3 is perhaps the most "even" of the films, but is "even" at a rather median level.

For me, Lost World contains the most exciting action sequences of all 3. But it bottoms out the most of all 3.

THE LOST WORLD is better than nothing.

Easily one of Spielberg's worst films. It's also his most pandering piece of political pap.

Pandering to what? Preservation of genetically-engineered dinosaurs?

It's a fairly vociferous justification of eco-terrorism, especially considering the 'good guys' are responsible for virtually every death in the film.

I haven't seen the film in years- how are the "Good Guys" responsible for the deaths? I don't remeber anything outside the dino-carnage and Julianne Moore's ass.

EDIT: just asked my friend- Vaughn let the dinosaurs out of the cages. Got it.
Damn those dino loving bastards.
Hippie filth.

The way I see it, both Johnston's Rocketeer and JP3 are the sort of good-natured adventure films that Hollywood could use more of. I find them both fun and extremely entertaining, not unlike Reynolds' Count of Monte Cristo or Campbell's first Zorro movie. It's lighter, old-fashioned fare, to be sure, but I'm not one that finds that a film has to be dark or mean-spirited to be entertaining.

I realize that it's natural to assume I'm seeing these movies through nostalgia-colored glasses, but with the exception of the Rocketeer I was well into my teens or early twenties by the time I saw any of them and I was beginning to really think about film somewhat objectively.

On a more subjective note, though, I really think that pointing to JP3's lack of realism and glaring plot holes as a reason it's inferior to its predecessors is a self-defeating argument.

I just thought TLW had a dodgy script. Maybe it was coproduced by EA.

Also Moore and Vaughn bring the baby Rex back to their trailer, leading directly to that tech guy getting chomped by the parents.

And Nick Van Owen takes the bullet slugs out of Roland's gun that he would've killed the bull Rex with.

LW was better then JP3, but that is not saying much.
Maybe the problem is that I actually think a sequel should go different places then the original, and JP2 repeated too much of the first . It was only when it got to San Diego that I really enjoyed it.
JP3 was a total mess.
And I won't even bother with JP4 unless they come up with a really different angle. Sorry, but Dinos eating people alone just does not cut it for me.
That is what being nearly 40 does to you: You demand more from your movies.

Well, apart from the relatively retarded B-Movie ending (which I dont mind cause Spielbergs obviously having so much fun doing it) I always quite enjoyed TLW. I loved that it was a fair bit darker, its got Spielbergs paw prints all over it (the trailer scene is Spielbergian gold I tells ya - and the raptors in the grass is almost Jaws-like) and Ive always been a bit of a closeted Goldblum fan so he worked really well for me as the lead. Pete Postlewaite is gold in everything hes ever been in so his brilliance is no great surprise. Hell even Moore is great slumming it like she is.

JP3, on the other hand just seemed like a dumbed down, shorter more kid-friendly remake of the original frankly and to be honest Im having trouble remembering all that much about it as it left such a minimal impression on me. It was so family friendly and lame Im surprised it wasnt a Chris Columbus production. I agree with Desslars review that it was like a made-for-TV version of JP.

So my vote goes for The Lost World well and truely.

Gee there are a lot of banned people who've posted in this thread...

Sweet Jesus that would have been awesome. Someday Joe Johnson is going to poke around CHUD, he's going to read that post, and he'll be found in his apartment the next day overdosed on sleeping pills. Oh, and Jumanji is getting some undeserved flak here, but I'll save that for another day and another thread.

The Lost World is most definately the better of the two sequels, and I'd say qualifies for a Good Movie even if far, far, far from great even as genre films go. Even on his worst days Spielberg can't make a bad film and the level of talent poured into this project in terms of cast, crew, special effects and production design, and score make it virtually impossible for it to be discounted entirely despite any bad lines or raptor deaths involving gymnastics. The action scenes are intense, the deaths and scenes of suspense are powerful and grab the audience by the nuts (especially Peter Stormare's aping of Hammond in the original novel).

The trailer/cliff scene has already been mentioned, but even so it must be again. The constant one-upping of the sequence and the way Richard Schiff's character busts his ass dealing with the situation as it gets worse and worse are enough to keep viewers tearing their hair out in chunks, and his most undeserving end makes it all the more effecting. Pisses me off every time, and it's supposed to.

Plus just the idea of dinosaur hunters is fucking awesome, and as far as I know hasn't been done anywhere else in the history of cinema except maybe that "cowboys vs. T-rex" monster flick from the 60s, I forget the title. The entire stampede/capture scene is kickass, and Pete Posthewaite is iconic and utterly badass. By the way, has anyone seen the cut scene with Posthewaite's character's original intro scene in Africa? Great stuff.

I'm actually pretty surprised to see so many people here calling the Lost World a Godzilla ripoff. Despite the fact that they both feature big reptiles (and the running Japanese shot, which always makes me laugh as they are shouting "this is why I left Tokyo!"), isn't the movie a pretty obvious homage to King Kong? It's the same structure with expeditions going to lost island with creatures, getting killed off, monster follows object of desire/love, monster captured, brought to city, breaks free and runs amok, finds object of desire, gets recaptured/killed. I'm surprised no-one else mentioned it (unless it's in the early '01 half of the thread, I've only read the recent stuff).

Valley of Gwangi (a Harryhausen classic) was the cowboys vs. dinosaurs flick. Beast from Hollow Mountain was a cheesier western (Mexican?) movie with dinos. speaking of cowboy's & dinos, i think it's funny that Chrichton is responsible for movies that feature amusement park dinos & amusement park cowboys (Westworld) going on a killing spree...

nice parallel comparison made about KK. i always thought JP1 was an homage to Dinosaurus and JP2 was an homage to Gorgo...

maybe JP4 can put dinos out on the range for a Gwangi redo... nevermind that's ridiculous...

I was so looking forward to seeing JP3 after getting my first look at the trailer, months in advance. When I finally saw the film I couldn't believe how bad it was from start to finish. The Lost World is still the better follow-up even though it had that annoying black girl in it.. and Julianne Moore(who makes me sick).

...um...why exactly?

I believe that JP3 was made to make TLW look better. I have always thought this. Watching JP3 made me absolutely appreciate TLW, no matter how much of the book it's not.

Nah, you won't convert me on "The Lost World". I watched it again last year, and I think it's just bloody boring. Sorry! I do like JP3, I think it's huge fun.

What's boring about it?