The Lost World (1997)

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by David Koepp, based on the novel by Michael Crichton
Starring Jeff Goldbum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Vince Vaughn, Richard Attenborough

My Advice: Wait for MST3K.

What a waste.  It was inevitable that they would make a sequel, but did it have to be this one?  The only thing that can be said for this Spielbergian bastard-child is that it wasn't as bad as the book, which read like the original novel run through a washer/dryer and then slapped with a different title.  Rather than take the obvious (and possibly more plausible) road and go back to the same island (which in the book was destroyed but not in the film), nooooo--let's make a totally different island--but redo the same film.  Instead of Richards and Mazello (who make an appearance for some reason or another) returning on the ride, we get Malcolm's daughter (played by teen-ninja Vanessa Lee Chester).  Instead of the edge-of-your seat "car-in-the-tree" sequence from the first, we get the "RV-on-the-cliff" sequence which seems to last 1/3 of the film.  Instead of Sam Neill coming to terms with fatherhood, which worked as an obligatory "human element" of the first roller coaster, we get Jeff Goldblum trying to do the same thing, but in an anemic script where the same "human element" is an afterthought.  And here's the million dollar question--what killed the people on the boat?  Free cuppa to anyone who can come with an answer to our satisfaction.  Pretty much the only good to come out of this was big $$ for Needcoffee.com favorite Postlethwaite.  We can hope.