Spielberg8217;s raptor8217;ous spiel

Apparently, the master guarded the story line so tightly that the prints were delivered to cineplexes only hours before screening as a result, few people knew of the Thursday previews and the movie halls were half-empty. He needn8217;t have bothered. Go in with no more expectation that a moronosaurus from the cretinaceous period.

The Lost World takes off, as expected, from where Jurassic Park left off. That clever bandicoot, genetic engineer John Hammond Richard Attenborough in a sidey, insipid role has stashed away more phrehistoric animals in another island called Isla Sorna who8217;d have guessed!. He dispatches a team the good guys the skeptical chaos-theory expert Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, and his fearless paleontologist girlfriend Julianna Moore as Sarah to chronicle their growth.

Plus there is Malcolm8217;s adopted daughter African-American Kelly Curtis Vanessa Lee Chester a politically correct message from Spielberg that the movie is kid worthy. Not sure. Although the film has a PG-13 rating, there is plenty of blood, gore and death count to scare kids.

Anyway, gaming into the reserve are a villainous bunch of bounty hunters and yahoos led by Hammond8217;s nephew Arliss Howard, representing greed and idiocy. Nephew wants to capture the animals and transport them to the San Diego zoo, thus upstaging uncle and saving Imgen, the bioengineering company which started the whole dangerous tamasha.

In that sense, The Lost World has a stronger scientific message than Jurassic Park, capturing human stupidity and rapacity as well as it does the spectacular behemoths.

Well, after getting a mauling from assorted dinosarii for well nigh 100 minutes the film runs 134 minutes, the crew manages to get a couple of T.Rex8217;s to San Diego. You guessed it. Next thing, parent Godzilla is stampeding through California suburbs going nuts trying to retrieve baby T.Rex. About here, the movie collapses into inanity and not even Spielberg can rescue it.

Despite the novelty of computer created prehistoric animals having worn off, the special effects are still dazzling, with visible technical improvements over Jurassic Park. One of the most spectacular scenes is two T.Rex8217;s doing a sort of rumba. If you manage not to pay too much attention to the weak story, the sheer magnificence of these prehistoric behemoths itself is enough to carry you through the movie.

If art imitates life, you could say now that computers imitate art imitates life. Like in Jurassic Park, the animals are the most wondrous thing about The Lost World. Wow.

In fact, such is the impact of Spielberg8217;s creations that only in America! there is now an element of pop in serious paleontology. Surely it is not a coincidence that in a stunning departure from its usually scholarly dinosaur exhibitions, the American Museum of Natural History is opening on Friday what is being termed its flashiest and most commercial show yet on dinosaurs, complete with ear-splitting noises, life-size models and theatrical lighting.

The show is already creating a rumpus in the scientific community for its commercial and glitzy touch.

Still, what makes Spielberg8217;s movie and the exhibition compelling despite their tackiness are the developments in frontier sciences like cloning and genome projects since Jurassic Park was released in 1993. For instance, the movies are partly based on the premise that dinosaur DNA, preserved for millions of years in the mummified gut of biting insects entrapped in amber, might be recovered reasonably intact and inserted into modern frog eggs to create living behemoths.

Sounds a little more plausible now than in 1993, doesn8217;t it? Well, who knows what lies in wait before the end of the millennium? Three years is a long, long time. We could have three more sequels, if nothing else.