11. The Lost World

“The Lost World” is a movie about dinosaurs. It takes place four years after its sequel “Jurassic Park”. In the movie, a lot of fantastic thing occur, but most of them fit nicely within the plot and so the audience needs to only suspend disbelief once. Well, almost once.

What does not fit nicely within the overall plot is the ending. At the end of the movie, a ship is carrying the dinosaurs back to the mainland. It wrecks into the dock and a guard opens the cargo hold, accidentally releasing the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

That’s all well and good, except that T. Rex had previously been inside a box-like container. How, exactly, did the dinosaur manage to escape from the box so that it could then escape the cargo hold when the guard opened it?

It’s a small flub, really, but the movie is so well done otherwise. Not only that, but the first movie, “Jurassic Park,” was equally well done. The flub becomes outrageous because it impugns the integrity of the movie, the movie that came before it, and the book on which everything is based.

You get to tell one big lie in fiction and then everything else must follow logically from that point. If it does not, then you have failed in your duty as a story teller. This movie follows logically until the very end, which is perhaps the worst of all sins because it doesn’t give the audience a chance to walk out and save themselves a lot of wasted time.