Yesterday evening, Katherine and I watched The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), which is the second of four Jurassic Park movies. Two weeks earlier, we watched the first of the four, Jurassic Park (1993). (We're trying to watch the first three movies in order, at home, before seeing the fourth movie, which has just come out, at the theater.) The second movie was much like the first. The dinosaur animations weren't as good as I thought they might be with four additional years of technological advancement, and the dialogue was silly or stilted in places. The Jeff Goldblum character is annoying as hell, with his sarcastic quips during tense situations. Julianne Moore is, in a word, awful.
The dinosaur hunters in the movie are obviously designed to represent bison hunters on the American Great Plains, or perhaps Euroamerican hunters in general. Once again, we get the cliché that Euroamericans are the great despoilers. Anyone who knows anything about the history of North America knows that native peoples were every bit as violent, destructive, and wasteful as Euroamericans, if not more so. Ever hear of a pishkun, for example? (See Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], for eyewitness accounts of staggering destruction and waste by native peoples.) But hey, why ruin a good story?
Here is the trailer.
