The Lost World (Page 1 of 2)

was it just me, or does this movie seem like a toy commercial?

Strange that the panel dislikes JP2 largely because the characters don't behave realistically and yet the panel liked The Mist in spite of the fact that the characters' actions are utterly ridiculous.

Also, it's okay to pronounce foreign names with your native accent, but not to just pretend the foreign name is an English word—so /stor-MAR-ay/.

Last edited by Zarban (2011-08-08 15:45:08)

Finished watching.

I think the movie just needed another draft. Smooth out Ian’s motivations, dump Kelly entirely, eliminate some of the red shirts (Aliens-style massacre, maybe), and punch up the dialog (only Goldblum got decent lines).

If Spielberg wanted to bring a T-rex back, then make that central to the story by becoming the third act and not a superfluous fourth ("Your girlfriend went to stop my nephew!"). The panel is right that the ship crash would be a great opening scene, but you could do that by making it a frame story. Start there, then go "ONE MONTH EARLIER" and get rid of the rich picnickers.

The Japanese call him Peetaa Sutohmayah, so, I think there's people to complain about before coming after America.

Last edited by Gregory Harbin (2011-08-09 00:08:00)

That's not a framing device, that's in media res or according to TVtropes, How We Got Here. And, in my opinion, it's a cheap hook and lazy writing.

It's basically the writer saying, "I can't be bothered to think up an interesting opening that establishes what I need to establish, so here's the climax right up front."

I feel like Brian is being especially finicky here...Finifter? Finicky?...Brian "Science!" Finicker!

To me, this isn't lazy. Cheap is subjective. A hook? Sure, but so what? A hook never hurt anyone (except maybe fish. HEY-O!). In any case, I feel this is just another way of telling your story. It's part of the language. Both Memento and Inception open at their climax/ending, essentially (as does The Prestige, now that I think about it. Heh, how amusing). There are a number of television shows that use this device as well. In fact, there are specific programs (sadly, no titles come to mind to help illustrate my point, but it's late and I'm tired) that format their entire run this way (start late in the story, then backtrack and build up to it).

EDITED TO ADD: Grounded For Life was one of the examples I was trying to think of.

Last edited by johnpavlich (2011-08-09 06:41:42)

Hey, if you've got a solid thematic reason to do it, knock yourself out. But if you realize your script (or rough cut) is just too damn slow at the outset so you lop off the first half of your climax and throw it up front, then that's lazy. If you're gonna do it, have a good reason for it.

I'm sorry, I just watched too many episodes of Battlestar Galactica that tried to cover their poor plotting by throwing their cheap cliffhanger in the teaser to have much patience for this gag anymore.

Meh. "How we got there" IS a type of frame story. Imagine if the Titanic frame story ended not with old Rose wistfully remembering Jack with an idiotic empty gesture but with the same iceberg crashing into the dock, coming ashore, and running amok. Same thing (and way better than Cameron's version).

And LAZY? HOW DARE YOU, SIR? I say lazy is opening with a completely unrelated scene of a little girl getting nipped by compies off-screen.

/tucks umbrella under arm, smooths mustache, and stalks off

I haven't listened to the full commentary yet, so I don't know if this is addressed or not.  But I feel like the problem with Teague's cleaned-up, save-the-animals version is that the dinosaurs essentially no longer become a threat. 

Sure, in JP 1, the dinosaurs weren't evil and didn't want to eat you because it was fun.  But we certainly weren't rooting for them either.  They were the antagonist, and it was a simple man vs. nature story.  Now granted, as with most man v. nature tales, a lesson was learned and we realize we never should have tampered with nature in the first place.  But this was all more conceptual, and not a physical series of actions throughout the film of people intending to capture/control the dinosaurs.

If we place all this focus on the hunters in Lost World, it becomes less clear who our antagonist is.  The only way to really do it would be to completely eliminate the dinosaurs as a threat, and make it just about stopping the "bad guys."  But then you completely eliminate the reason people go to see a Jurassic Park movie.

And then if you throw both in, it becomes a man vs. nature vs. man? story.  It's like making a movie where our hero tries to stop poachers from harming panda bears.  Oh yeah, and the panda bears also EAT YOU!!!

EDIT: Better example.  Jaws 5!!  Chief Brody has to stop the bad men from hurting the shark.

Last edited by gzarra (2011-08-09 19:50:46)

But we see those all the time. Any disaster film generally has this element, to varying degrees of success. Our main characters may be trying to survive the hurricane/blizzard/earthquake/alien invasion, but ultimately the meat of the conflict almost always comes from the other human beings. The disaster du jour doesn't become less of a threat -- we still get action scenes where our heroes have to run from some variation of explosions -- but the force of nature is precisely a force of nature, it doesn't have intent the way the antagonizing humans do.

If the story of JP2 was that Malcolm's crazy environmentalist girlfriend wanted to save the dinosaurs from poachers or whatever, that doesn't make the dinosaurs non-threatening at all, because the dinosaurs don't understand or care that some of the pink snacks are "on their side."