I really don’t understand what someone could possibly dislike about this movie—it’s a theme-park ride, sure, but one helmed by one of the greatest purveyors of spectacle to ever do it, with a stacked supporting cast of Hey It’s That Guy heavy-hitters (Richard Schiff, Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Stormare, and a young and decidedly un-funny Vince Vaughn.) “This time, there are two T. Rexes” sounds like the dumbest double-down ever and yet, the only time Spielberg even really pulls that card, it’s in service of that breathtaking cliffhanger set piece, a nearly 15-minute sequence of Rube Goldberg proportions that always feels as tense as it did on the first watch.
The much-maligned coda with one of the Rex-parents loose in San Diego? It’s barely 10 minutes, tapping out just before it can wear out its welcome and get too Godzilla. And everything in between is just one incredibly fun sequence after another. Spiels gets to indulge in some of his deepest horror impulses and, with Swiss Army Man Jeff Goldblum promoted to lead status, also his most comedic. (There’s a bit I’d never really registered before this most recent rewatch where Goldblum closes the door on a raptor as if that’s something a ravenous creature would actually register; when it crashes through a window instead and Goldblum calmly reopens the door to run out, the timing is so perfect that I actually laughed out loud.)
This time around I also noticed how the script doesn’t really take the easy way out with Pete Postlethwaite’s big game hunter who’s only on the expedition to face off with a T-Rex. (Vaighn’s tree-hugging radical gets the line of the movie with: “The animal exists on the planet for the first time in tens of millions of years and the only way you can express yourself is to kill it?”) In a lesser film he’d be the villain who regularly butts heads with our heroes and meets a grisly deserved death, instead he’s among the more nurturing of the soulless company men and ends the movie with his perspective at least slightly changed.
Does Jeff Goldblum’s inexplicably Black daughter K.O. a velociraptor with her killer gymnastics moves? Yes, and like everything else in this film, it’s so gleefully ridiculous that you just have to laugh. Two minutes before that happens there’s an overhead shot of the raptors swarming a convoy of humans in the tall grass that’s too fire to complain about anything that happens after in that scene.
This isn’t a case of every film that followed being so bad that we have to be more forgiving of the one that was mid. Spielberg delivered high art with Jurassic Park, and in recognizing that it would be futile to re-attempt the magic trick, settled for gourmet popcorn with its sequel. The Lost World, on its own merits, is one of the great summer blockbusters. Put some respect on it. And if Scarlett Johansson can’t restore the feeling with this franchise, let’s at least pray Spielberg does when he puts his hat back in the ring with a new original event film next summer.
