THE LOST WORLD : JURASSIC PARK (34)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite

The Pitch: Dino-mayhem on "Site B", the island where the JURASSIC PARK beasts were originally bred. Apparently.

Theo Sez: The dinos are awesome - it's easy to forget how jaw-droppingly vivid the JURASSIC PARK effects are : not that these massive beasts are especially memorable monsters (just big teeth, nothing really creepy), but their combination of sheer size and recognisable animal qualities makes for a feeling - the impossible made imaginable - that's at the very heart of movie-watching. Unfortunately what they do isn't any more interesting than the look-out-behind-you high jinks of cheesy monster movies like ANACONDA - only more portentous and half an hour longer, substituting for ANACONDA's goofy self-parody a solemn self-importance : the action scenes are interspersed with homilies on good parenting ("You like to have kids but you don't want to spend time with them," our hero is admonished) and insufferable eco-twaddle, importuning us to "trust in Nature" and insisting that Man, not Dinosaur, is the villain of the piece (hey, we don't go around ripping T. Rexes apart with our bare teeth! give humanity a break!). It's a galumphing, unimaginative behemoth, its over-literal exposition making it seem stiff and geriatric beside the quicksilver dexterity of FACE / OFF or THE FIFTH ELEMENT - summer movies which make a joke of their summer movieness ; this one just seems uninterested, which is pretty much what you'd expect from a film where neither the title (what "Lost World"?) nor the marketing ("Something Has Survived"? what didn't survive in JURASSIC PARK?) makes any sense. Unsurprisingly, though Spielberg does rise to the occasion once or twice - notably in a great overhead shot of unseen velociraptors cutting swathes through tall grass as they attack from all directions - he generally seems distracted, his mind not really on the job. The film's defining moment probably comes early on, in the first five minutes, when a woman's scream at the sight of a mangled dino-victim carries over onto a shot of our hero stifling a yawn : for all the hype, it's an expensive snooze. Oh yeah, and one more thing : could someone please explain how in God's name that big T. Rex could've been forced down into the cargo hold when it had already killed everyone on the ship? Call me an old dinosaur, but that kind of thing really annoys me.