Based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Traumatised by his earlier encounters, Bob’s worst nightmares come true when he finds a terrifying dinosaur stowaway on board.
The Lost World remains among the most successful films of all time and features an all-star cast including Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Morre and Pete Postlethwaite. With a volcano about to explode the scientists set out to save their prehistoric paradise and its dinosaur inhabitants. And if the story and performances are bad, then good effects are nothing more than a band-aid.It has been four years since the disaster at Jurassic Park and two groups are in a race against time that will determine the fate of the remote island's prehistoric inhabitants. If those are good, if you find the characters and situations compelling, then you'll buy into what's happening regardless of the quality of the effects. The "proper" way to use special effects is to use the best technique for each shot, ideally to mix multiple techniques so that the weaknesses of each are compensated for by the strengths of the others, rather than foolishly assuming that the more recent technique is automatically superior to older, proven methods just because it's newer and flashier.īesides, who cares how fake the dinosaurs look when you've got John Rhys-Davies and David Warner? Special effects only exist to support the story and performances. CG was only used in shots where animatronics couldn't do the job, like full-length shots of the dinosaurs running or jumping. The reason the original Jurassic Park's dinosaurs were so convincing is that in the vast majority of shots, they were live animatronic creatures that were actually physically real, present on the set, and interacting directly with the actors. Though it wouldn't really make sense evolutionarily, it could be a creepy and original look, and when pitted against the South American native humans, could go a long way towards remedying the awkward parts of the subtext while still honoring the story and adventurous spirit of the novel.Īny other fans of the book hankering for a good adaptation?ĬG effects are not more "proper" than any other kind. And while the dinosaurs don't really do much in the book, maybe there could be a Jurassic Park-style T-Rex-as-rescuer climax.Īs for the ape-men, I think a neat thing to try would be to make their fur whitish. ape-men narrative, not to significantly change the premise, but to amp up the tension a bit. Once there, problem #1 can be addressed by retooling the humans vs. Obviously, for a hypothetical two-hour movie, the gang should reach the plateau in time for the second act, around 35 minutes at the latest. It's an episodic book that doesn't readily conform to the three-act story structure.Ģ) The ape-men plot, which has already been "done" with the Planet of the Apes" series, doesn't hold up all that well, in that it reflects old ignorance about the nature of apes, and can all to easily be read as a Europeans vs. The novel's half over before they even reach the prehistoric plateau, and when they do, they dodge a few dinosaurs, have a few encounters with savage "ape-men", and then are adopted by a native human tribe for a while until they sneak back to civilization via a tunnel.
Seems to me that, in our digital effects age, the novel is conspicuously overdue for a big-screen adaptation that doesn't add an anachronistic love interest or otherwise muck up the narrative.Īs I see it, there are two main obstacles to doing so:ġ) The pacing.
There's been a TV show and a 2001 BBC movie, which I eagerly fired up a year or so ago but quickly abandoned due to the lifeless direction and general shoddiness. There have been many adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, perhaps most memorably (though I've never seen it) the 1925 silent film that served as the special effects warm-up to King Kong.