

Life always finds a way. At the end of the first Jurassic Park film, it looked like the dino threat was over, and Dr. Ian Malcolm and the rest were safely out of harm’s way. But in that film’s 1997 sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, life found ways to get both the thunderlizards and Dr. Malcolm back for another carnivorous adventure.
John Hammond, the billionaire behind the failed Jurassic Park theme park, wants Ian to take a trip to Isla Sorna, home to the ominous-sounding “Site B.” This was the breeding area for the first film’s dinos, and despite the lessons he supposedly learned from Jurassic Park, Hammond wants to keep Site B going as a research habitat. Ian wants no part of it until he learns that former love Dr. Sarah Harding is already there with her own expedition. Against his better judgment, Ian takes the trip, and his teenage gymnast daughter Kelly stows away on the voyage.
Arriving on Isla Sorna, Ian and company discover that a second group of homo sapiens is there, too, but this one has a more sinister motive. Company man Peter Ludlow wants to catch a few samples and bring them back stateside for a non-petting zoo. His team is headed up by great white hunter Roland Tembo, who plans to bag a T-Rex hide as long as he’s here.
The two groups end up together after Sarah and her animal activist partner Nick Van Owen free Ludlow’s captured beasties and try to nurse a baby T-Rex back to health. Soon, Mama and Papa Rex come looking for junior, and then the running and the screaming begin in earnest. A series of cliffhanging action sequences ensues—including a T-Rex/truck battle, an attack of the tiny compsognathuses and a velociraptor siege in Site B’s abandoned headquarters–and just when it looks like our heroes are once again safe, Peter Ludlow’s greed opens suburban San Diego up for some King Kong-style terror.
Like the first film, The Lost World was designed as a non-stop chase, pitting gargantuan predators against what Roland Tembo (quoting Hemingway) terms a “moveable feast.” Since the pseudo-science background was already taken care of in Jurassic Park, director Steven Spielberg cut right to the chase and never let up.
It was another thrill ride of the movie, packed with elaborate special effects, and it was another global smash at the box office. A third film arrived in 2001, with Joe Johnston (Jumanji, The Rocketeer) taking over the director’s chair.
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