The Lost World: Jurassic Park

A lot of people love to criticize JP3 for a number of reasons, like repeating the last movie or hyping up the Spinosaur so much but in my personal opinion, I think JP3 captures that "theme park movie" feel much better than The Lost World does.

For one thing, this is a much darker film. I don't just mean how most of the movie takes place at night, but the while the body-count in the original was merely implied, we never really got to see the carnage - in fact, I think there were only three people we saw dying on screen, and not only that, but there were only four confirmed kills in the whole movie. Meanwhile there are dozens of people slaughtered in this film quite explicitly - not necessarily bloody, but it's quite obvious those guys didn't make it. The deaths in the original film, when they did happen on-screen, were relatively quick and didn't linger; meanwhile, some of the deaths in this film are rather drawn-out and even taunt the viewer with the possibility that the character might actually make it, only for them to die horribly. There's also the aspect of the "cold corporate greed" which reduces John Hammond to a bit part, and makes InGen far more villainous than Dennis Nedry could ever dream of being. I suppose there is some conservationist argument that could be made that makes so many of the victims supposedly less sympathetic, but outside of like one guy who faces a very ironic fate, most of them just struck me as guys doing a job and most certainly didn't deserve their fates.

Then there's a couple of really gaping plot holes without any good explanation for them that really strike as deliberately done just so the plot could proceed in a specific way, such as a character who gets a whole establishing scene to show us he knows his profession, ignoring a pretty massive Chekhov's gun - and you can't even just pretend he missed it, because he's the one who draws attention to it! So after a lot of plot contrivances and characters acting like idiots, the only scene I actually liked in the whole film was the animal control department vehicle speeding away from the scene, which is still funny to this day. A glimmer light in this terribly mediocre sequel, I suppose.