The Lost World: Jurassic Park
The same blueprint as Aliens, the sequel is a balls-to-the-wall action film with little girls in critical roles. Some of the Jurassic World plot bullshit is already present here!
This time, since Alan and his girl are off in a dig or something, Ian Malcom must be both the divorced scumbag AND the loving boyfriend. I really don’t care about his sexual proclivities, but he runs off to the island to save his girlfriend and her daughter of another woman tags along by accident, how can he keep track of all that?
Oh yeah, there was a second island all along, and dinos roam free there. The newly disgraced Hammond, the billionaire from last time, is now an hardcore ecologist after being fired of his own company. The new CEO is his nephew, a shitter version of himself.
Malcolm’s girlfriend is a Dian Fossey wannabe and is there studying dinos without much interference, but for some reason she will go out of their way to save a distressed baby T-Rex. The new CEO gets there too, in a separate party of dozens of rugged hunters, led by an even manlier Great White Hunter than the last time. He’s so White, he has an Indian caddie, but for guns.
They get to the mainland and the T-Rex breaks loose, so it’s up to Malcolm and his girlfriend to save the day, by fetching the baby and lure his to the boat again. Malcolm is so divorced, not only he wears his leather jacket, he drives a convertible Cadillac.
This is just an anodyne action film, any semblance of the old religious crap washed away like Peter Stormare’s blood. There’s also industrial amounts of product placement, not at the level of Jurassic World, but it’s more than usual for a “serious” film.
Ripped off and/or homaged in so many films: The Mummy Returns cribbed the long grass scene. King Kong improved on the stampede. Uncharted (the games) improved on trailer ridge fall. Even more incredible, this has the same joke as one of the Austin Powers films: as T-Rex rampages through San Diego, a group of Japanese run away and mutter something I’m assuming is Godzilla-related.
The little girl at the start, the proper British mini-lady that gets attacked by mini-dinos is the lead from 10,000 BC! Her generation’s Ke Huy Quan.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.