Welcome back to Jurassic Park

If you haven't seen the first Jurassic Park film, here's what you missed. Man creates dinosaurs from fossilized DNA. Dinosaurs get loose in zoo. Dinosaurs eat people. People barely escape dinosaur island.

Thank God for Site B. Yes, there's a second island with dinosaurs on it. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has had a change of heart. Instead of pursuing capitalism, he's now a conservationist. When InGen is taken from him, John recruits a team of researchers to visit Isla Sorna (Site B) and document the existence of the dinosaurs. Doing this will pull public opinion in their favor and prevent InGen from pilfering the island. So, Hammond recruits Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn), and Dr. Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore). Upon proposing that Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) return to Jurassic Park, Malcolm refuses. When he learns that Harding is already on the island, he races off to save his girlfriend. Little does Malcolm know that his daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), has sneaked aboard.

Once on the island, the team encounters a second team. This team is lead by Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard). Since Ludlow managed to remove InGen from Hammond's control, he seeks to recoup what he can from Isla Sorna and turn a profit. His team is lead by Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite), who is an experienced stalker of animals. Their goal is to harvest as many dinosaurs as they can for exhibition in a zoo on the mainland. All seems to go well, until Ludlow's team's base camp is completely destroyed. Then the two teams must find a way to survive in this Lost World.

First off, what is the world was the idea with Malcolm's daughter? Kelly is African-American. Not that that's an issue, but if you've read the book, Arby was African-American and Kelly was Caucasian. Both children were near useless in the book, so including them seemed a bit odd. It is my belief that they casted Kelly for shock value. In addition to this, Kelly and Arby were not related to Malcolm at all in the book. Just a major change I noticed that really threw me off. Especially since Kelly serves little to no purpose at all in the film. From what I can tell, it seems like they just wanted to have another kid in Jurassic Park to say it's a family film.

Moving on, there are only two dinosaurs of interest in this film. The first is the T-Rex. Early on, you realize that this is going to be all about the T-Rex, when Team B stumbles upon its nest. Second, Velociraptors take a minor role in the film. Between these two carnivores, the teams will have their hands full. Also, upon the destruction of both team's camps, they must merge. Surviving both dinosaur attacks and flaring tempers is no easy task.

The Lost World liberally mixes the two books. The base story is from the second book, but elements like the T-Rex attacking people behind a waterfall is directly from the first Jurassic Park novel. When going into this, you must keep in mind that the screenplay is an almost completely different story from the novel. Once you come to terms with this, you'll enjoy the film.

What impresses me about the Lost World DVD is the abundance of special features. Not only is there a “Making of” featurette, but there are also several paleontological videos. You can watch for hours and learn more about dinosaurs than you ever wanted to. Because ILM (best known for Star Wars) played a huge role in the production of Jurassic Park and The Lost World, you get a behind the scenes look at ILM studios. It's pretty interesting stuff. There are also documentaries on how they merged the CGI dinosaurs with live action actors.

Here's the failing point of The Lost World. It feels more like a safari adventure than a Jurassic Park. You could've easily replaced the dinosaurs with lions and called it a film. Because of the divergence from the book, the “Jurassic Park” feeling was just lost. Although, I'm glad Malcolm wasn't spasmatically spouting off about his chaos theory.

Bottom line, The Lost World is a classic. It's a pretty good follow up to Jurassic Park. I was a little puzzled by the way they chose to end the film, but it did conclude itself. I would recommend owning this film, sheerly for the fact that it's another benchmark in film history.