I Think This Is The Most Underrated Jurassic Park Movie

As a lifelong fan of the Jurassic Park franchise, I wholeheartedly think that The Lost World: Jurassic Park is both one of the best installments of the series and easily its most underrated. I loved dinosaurs as a kid, and I still love dinosaurs to this day, so as you can imagine, I was definitely in the target audience for the Jurassic Park movies from day one. It brings me nothing but joy to see the franchise continue into the 21st century with the Jurassic World movies, and see kids discovering the wonder of dinosaurs and the adventure of the series as I once did. Even still, the divisive reputation of 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park has always perplexed me.

Based upon Michael Crichton’s 1995 novel The Lost World, the movie follows Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) as he leads an expedition to InGen’s “Site B” on Isla Sorna. With the dinosaur population still thriving on InGen’s island factory for dinosaur cloning (with or without the Lysine contingency), Dr. Malcolm and his team are tasked by John Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough) with capturing a photo record of dinosaurs on Isla Sorna to establish the island as a biological preserve, and prevent InGen from taking the dinosaurs and establishing a new Jurassic Park in San Diego. The Lost World continues to remain polarizing among fans for its much darker tone compared to its predecessor. However, that tone shift, among other factors, is exactly why I regard The Lost World as a movie well deserving of a major re-evaluation.

The Lost World Ramps Up The Scope of Its Predecessor (& Has Way More Dinosaurs)

While Steven Spielberg didn’t keep the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park as obscured as the shark in Jaws, he made sure to keep each of them off-screen long enough for their eventual arrival to really hit hard when the first Brachiosaurus is seen by the incoming tour group. The T-Rex escape scene in particular (still the best T-Rex scene in the Jurassic Park franchise), occurs a full hour in, while the Velociraptors are also not seen in their full glory until the third act. All told, the dinos’ on-screen presence in Jurassic Park is comparatively conservative next to the succeeding movies in the franchise. Case in point: the tremendous abundance of on-screen dinosaurs in The Lost World.

With Jurassic Park standing as the box office champ at the time, Spielberg goes out of his way to deliver dino action galore in The Lost World. As soon as humans set foot on Isla Sorna, dinosaurs are on-screen within moments, and the movie also takes great care to extensively expand its dino roster. While the obvious Jurassic Park mainstays of the T-Rex and the Velociraptors are back, The Lost World brings in many new species of both carnivores and herbivores, including the Stegosaurus, the hammer-headed Pachycephalosaurus, and the deceptively tiny predators known as Compsognathus, or “Compys.” In terms of sheer dinosaur quantity and the scope of their role in the movie’s story, The Lost World is a classic case of a sequel actively building upon and expanding the scale of its predecessor in every way it can.

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The Lost World is The First Attempt to Make Dinosaurs Into Characters

The Jurassic World movies are well-known for the relationship between Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his trained Velociraptor, Blue. Their dynamic shows Blue as a genuine dino protagonist with an actual personality that resonates with audiences, rather than a mere prehistoric killing machine. However, it was The Lost World that first started the trend of actually making the franchise’s dinosaurs into real characters, as seen with the movie’s T-Rex family. The infant T-Rex becomes an object of audience sympathy with the pain it experiences and its repeated abductions, while its parents are presented in a wholly different light from the T-Rex seen in Jurassic Park. In the words of Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), they’re just protecting their baby.

To be sure, the T-Rexes are still very much the main dino antagonists in The Lost World, but they only enter the fray at all when their infant is kidnapped by Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite) to use as bait for the male T-Rex. The efforts of Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) and Dr. Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) to fix the infant’s broken leg lead to the T-Rexes’ misunderstanding their intentions, setting them on a movie-long pursuit of the humans. But it’s one driven by parental protectiveness rather than simply dino predators seeking lunch.

The T-Rex family arc is also paralleled in Roland Tembo’s own story, with Tembo brought along as InGen’s guide and hunting expert. Tembo has a white whale in wanting to hunt a male T-Rex, seeing it as the ultimate hunter’s trophy, but despite successfully tranquilizing the male T-Rex, he becomes disillusioned with his quest after his friend Ajay Sidhu (Harvey Jason) is killed by Velociraptors. Even as a kid, I saw The Lost World as kind of three Jurassic Park movies in one, with the main story of Ian Malcolm and Co. trying to stop InGen’s plot, the tale of a T-Rex couple protecting their newborn infant, and a hunter on an Ahab-like quest for a T-Rex head who eventually realizes he’s “spent enough time in the company of death.”

When all’s said and done, The Lost World makes the T-Rex family into anti-heroes of sorts, protecting their infant as any parent would while still being carnivorous monsters. By the end, when the male T-Rex unleashes his infant upon InGen CEO Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), the T-Rex family has undergone a true dinosaur arc of saving their infant while teaching the youngster to become a hunter. The Lost World‘s final scene of the T-Rex family in a warm embrace back on Isla Sorna is the most genuinely heartwarming moment the T-Rexes have had in the franchise, and sets up the dinosaurs becoming actual characters — from the protective Velociraptor family pursuing their stolen eggs in Jurassic Park III to the arrival of the ever-endearing Blue in Jurassic World.

The Lost World Is The Closest Thing We Have To An R-Rated Jurassic Park

Ever since I was a kid enraptured by dinosaurs in general and the Jurassic Park franchise specifically, I’ve often wondered (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) what a Jurassic Park movie would look like if it really took the gloves off. That is to say, cast aside the series’ long-running mandate to be a four-quadrant, PG-13 blockbuster franchise and actually go for a hard R-rating.

Obviously, that’s extremely unlikely to happen as long a major studio like Universal Pictures is writing the checks, which has made me perfectly happy to settle for a general R-rated dinosaur movie with a Jurassic Park-level budget and effects. The Roger Corman-produced Carnosaur movies certainly get the R-rated part of that equation down, but their very low-budget dino effects prevent them from fulfilling the standards of that R-rated dinosaur movie fantasy. With that said, it seems that Steven Spielberg may have been thinking the same thing with how much he pushes the PG-13 rating in The Lost World.

While the Jurassic Park franchise has always been intense in its dinosaur action, The Lost World has often been noted for its darker tone and much more brutal content. Looking at The Lost World within the context of the Jurassic Park franchise, the movie is truly a borderline R-rated dinosaur adventure. I remember being plenty shocked at the sight of Eddie Carr being ripped in two by the T-Rex parents, or of InGen worker Carter (Thomas Rosales Jr.) being gruesomely stepped on by the vengeful male T-Rex and carried under the dino’s foot like a dead bug stuck to a sneaker. And don’t get me started on the shock and heartbreak at seeing the male T-Rex devour a family dog during its San Diego rampage (the dog lover in me would surely have been dialing John Wick’s number if it were available at the time.)

Even the less graphic deaths in The Lost World are presented with a great deal of blood and dino horror, and that second point is crucial. Even more so than he already did in Jurassic Park, Spielberg strives to make the dinosaurs truly scary in The Lost World, as clearly seen in moments like the T-Rex pursuing humans behind a waterfall or the Velociraptors snatching InGen workers into their clutches under long grass like something out of a Predator film. The male T-Rex’s San Diego attack really highlights this, with screenwriter David Koepp making a cameo as a terrified man being snatched in the T-Rex’s jaws and screaming for his life before being chomped into dino chow.

While Jurassic Park certainly does a splendid job of portraying the dinosaurs as scary movie monsters, Spielberg doubles down to make them the most terrifying they’ve ever been. With the sheer intensity of The Lost World, I also have suspected for years that Spielberg sought to take Jurassic Park as close to an R-rating as Universal Pictures would allow him to, and it’s an endeavor that the franchise has never really attempted since.

The Lost World might be the most divisive Jurassic Park movie, especially with its darker tone, but that’s always been why it’s resonated with me personally. The Jurassic Park franchise has all the adventure of an Indiana Jones movie, and due to the dinosaurs, Universal Pictures has wanted the series to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. With The Lost World, Spielberg made an effort to color outside of the lines a little, with a markedly darker tone that inched right up to the R-rated line, all while keeping the series’ adventurous spirit intact and greatly expanding upon the scope, quantity, and actual characterization of the dinosaurs themselves. As far as I’m concerned, that all makes The Lost World: Jurassic Park the most underrated Jurassic Park movie.