Cinema
The Lost World (PG, selected cinemas)
Carry on killing
Mark Steyn
Acouple of months ago, a dog in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, attacked a neighbour's chicken. Under the town's rig- orous 'three strikes, you're dead' law, he was sentenced to die, prompting a local outcry and mounting pressure on the state's governor to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. At this point, various legal experts weighed in, arguing that, under the state's constitution, the gover- nor's power of clemency extended only to human beings on death row, not to any other species. Tired of having to carry the cost of feeding the inmate during these constitutional arguments, the municipal authorities reversed their decision and gave the dog 48 hours to leave town. If he ever returned to Portsmouth again, he'd be shot on sight. He now lives in a neighbouring community, and his family visits him every weekend.
Other jurisdictions are even tougher including Britain, at least since Kenneth Baker decided to transform himself into a Lee Kuan Yew for pit-bulls. So what I want to know, after seeing The Lost World, is: who does Steven Spielberg's Tyran- nosaurus Rex have for a lawyer? This guy chews up the usual minor expedition mem- bers on a remote tropical island, dismem- bers the entire crew of the boat bringing him to California, chows down on several prominent San Diego dignitaries and then rampages through the city streets, killing the citizenry indiscriminately. All this on top of entering the United States illegally. Yet, at the end, all he gets is a tranquilliser dart in the butt and a ship back to his island, accompanied by half the US Navy. Back in his own natural environment, though at first he may miss the great taste of mall pedestrian, he'll be able to frolic undisturbed by man's madness. For, as chastened dino-breeder Richard Attenbor- ough says, henceforth he'll be working much more closely 'with the Costa Rican Department of Biological Preserves'. I very much doubt whether there's a Department of Biological Preserves in Costa Rica and, if there is, it's probably something to do with organic marmalade. But, either way, I can't see the American government being happy to entrust them with control of the world's dinosaur population.
The only 'lost world' is ours. Spielberg's lost it and so have the movie-goers who collectively paid $90 million to see this pic- ture in its first four days of release. For, even on the level of summer blockbusters, this film makes no sense at all. Ever since he cannily remade Lassie, Come Home and called it ET, Spielberg has preferred to operate to Jurassic era plots dressed up with space-age wizardry. The template here is King Kong: it starts in a primaeval mist- shrouded jungle of vines and redwoods; it ends in the big city to which the great white hunter has been foolish enough to take the beast. In between, every cliché of the genre is faithfully disinterred — for example, the superstitious natives who refuse to take the expedition any further: 'They call these islands . . . Las Cinco Muertes."What does that mean?'
But King Kong displays a sounder under- standing of human nature. In The Lost World, the only reason any of the bad things happen is because a Greenpeace photographer comes across a wounded baby T Rex and decides they have to set his broken leg. Presumably this is so T-boy, with his leg fully restored, can carry on killing everybody in sight as nature intend- ed (or, in this case, as Richard Attenbor- ough intended). Unlike Jurassic Park, which didn't skimp on the savagery, we're now supposed to regard the T Rexes and velociraptors as baby seals in dinosaur's clothing.
Of course, nobody goes to these films for characterisation. We're here to marvel at the computer generations and the anima- trollies, which have, indeed, improved. The trouble is Spielberg can't find anything new for them to do: the dinosaurs thump through the undergrowth with that distinc- tive waddle, like blue-collar lard-butts stampeding a Dunkin' Donuts. But there's nothing to match the pace and tension of the first film's 'raptors-in-the-kitchen finale. The 'money shot' — as porno direc- tors call it — is that of the T Rex roaring against the skyline of San Diego at night, but it has a generic, all-purpose monster- on-the-loose feel. Back in 1933, even the two journeymen directors of King Kong understood the need for the primal sensa- tion of Kong halfway up the Empire State Building.
The best moment comes when the T Rex approaches US Immigration — 'Welcome To The United States Of America. No fruits, vegetables or animals beyond this point' — and smashes through the post. If Spielberg is happy to accord dinosaurs the status of eco-friendly 'animals', he's even more blasé about reducing the human beings to fruits and vegetables. Of Jeff Goldblum, his white girlfriend and black child, the champagne-swilling Brits, there's nothing to be said. Such honours as there are go to Pete Postlethwaite as a bullet- headed Ahab for the Nineties: 'All I want is the right to hunt one of these tyran- nosaurs — a male, a buck. How and why is my business,' he adds, forestalling any attempt to query his motivation. But even this obsession never comes to any dramati- cally satisfying resolution.
Maybe if the actors were replaced by ani- matronics, they might at least be given as rounded a character as the monsters. As it is, The Lost World seems perfunctory busy but joyless, like turning up ten min- utes before closing time and getting rushed round the guided tour. Just as owners grow to resemble their dogs, so Spielberg's films are turning into his dinosaurs: big, brutal, but with no imagination.
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