As chaos theory predicted, the second attempt doesn’t go the same way.
Jeff Goldblum spends much of The Lost World: Jurassic Park looking like a man who regrets answering the phone. Not in-character, necessarily – although Ian Malcolm’s reluctant return to dino-terror is papered over with a metatextual air of contractual obligation – but Goldblum himself, navigating the wreckage of his charisma as it’s bolted onto a character re-engineered for box office brawn. This is not the wry chaos theorist of Jurassic Park, leaning louchely and letting the leather do the talking. This is Ian Malcolm recast as Action Dad, complete with bland moral purpose, a daughter to rescue, and the creeping suspicion that someone at Universal saw Independence Day and misread what audiences actually liked about it.
You can feel the strain almost immediately – not just from Goldblum, but from the film itself. The Lost World wants to roar with the same iconic ferocity as its predecessor, but every beat lands like an echo. Spielberg, ever the showman, delivers a few showstoppers – a trailer dangling over a cliff, raptors in the long grass – but they’re stitched into a plot so lumpen it plays like a deleted scenes reel in search of a narrative. The film lifts generously from the unfilmed remains of Crichton’s first novel, less because they suit the story and more because they were lying around, already branded. The result is oddly inert: spectacle without suspense, a sequel that mistakes escalation for innovation. It’s not that dinosaurs in San Diego is a bad idea – the film just isn’t interested in earning it and when it does eventually come it feels like an abandoned idea for yet another film bolted on to the end of this one so the story doesn’t just grind anticlimactically to a halt.
Jurassic Park was lean, kinetic and precise but its follow-up is overbuilt and unfocused, padding itself with extra characters, subplots, and a second island like a cover band trying to fill an encore slot. Pete Postlethwaite does his best Robert Shaw impression as a Quint-lite big game hunter chasing the ultimate trophy or maybe just screen time, while Julianne Moore’s Sarah Harding brings energy and presence to a role that can’t quite decide whether she’s the team’s moral compass or just another asset in need of recovery. The film gestures toward her expertise and independence and often sidelines her in favour of broader narrative mechanics but Moore does what she can, even when the character’s choices feel driven more by plot demands than personal logic. Vince Vaughn, though, fares even worse. A vaguely sketched photojournalist/ eco-warrior whose background is more explained than explored, his Nick Van Owen is little more than a back-up action man inserted as a structural safety net should Ian Malcolm’s transformation into leading man fail to stick. Whether the first revision of Ian Malcolm’s character (he appears in four Jurassic movies but never as the same character twice) works or not remains debatable, but The Lost World clearly felt that it did, or worked well enough that Vaughn simply disappears from the film’s final act, dropped like the narrative ballast he is.
The Lost World isn’t, of course, in any way a disaster. The effects hold up, the jungle atmosphere is rich and oppressive, and when it remembers to be a monster movie, it still delivers the goods. Spielberg remains incapable of staging a boring chase but it’s a film whose spliced together DNA is starting to unravel: trying to raise the stakes while playing it safe, pretending to be a continuation while quietly undoing much of what made Jurassic Park work. Malcolm’s newfound paternal instincts feel as stapled-on as the film’s morality – a cautionary tale with nothing specific to caution against, save hubris in its most generic form and an unfocused gesture towards corporate environmental malfeasance.
What lingers most, though, is a sense of reluctance. The Lost World doesn’t feel like a story anyone was desperate to tell. It feels like a film that exists because it had to, because Jurassic Park made too much money not to warrant a follow-up. And while Spielberg is too skilled to phone it in entirely, his heart clearly isn’t in it – not surprising, perhaps, given that this was Spielberg’s first return to blockbuster territory after completing Schindler’s List, the film that marked an irreversible shift in his filmmaking and a reckoning, perhaps, with the limits of spectacle; the childlike wonder that had once propelled his adventure sensibilities now sitting uneasily alongside the weight of historical tragedy. A pre-Schindler Spielberg might have embraced the exuberant chaos of The Lost World. The post-Schindler Spielberg can’t quite bring himself to and quietly accepts that ‘good enough’ would do.

