The Lost World: Jurassic Park
The original Jurassic Park is my favorite movie of all time. Even though I recognize the film's flaws (some of which are huge) it is overall a masterpiece--one of Spielberg's best films and THE best dinosaur movie ever made. A few years later, Crichton went back to the Mesozoic well and Spielberg came right along for the ride. David Koepp took Crichton's book and basically re-wrote it, made it more of a family picture, more of a survival story. He made it a lot worse.
The Lost World is an incredibly bad movie. It has pacing problems, casting problems, effects problems, plotting and scripting problems, etc. The whole gammut of "bad movie problems" are here. The movie is promising for about twenty minutes between the opening scene and the call to action by John Hammond. After that, **** gets shitty. The effects scenes are...THERE, but everything looks muddy and out-of-focus. Part of this is because of the increased focus on pure CGI effects, whereas the first movie balanced CGI and animatronics. The most effective CGI is at the very beginning of the movie, with the family of Stegosaurus. Everything else is a muddy mess, even the tyrannosaurs and ESPECIALLY the raptors.
I'm not saying the book ("The Lost World") was a good book by any means (really...read it) but it's plot was better than the movie, more coherent, and had a lot more to do with the darker backstory of Jurassic Park. While the book provides Michael Crichton with an avenue to espout everything New he's learned about Dinosaurs since the first book, it also gives an interesting side of the geneticists and manufacturing of Jurassic Park and how the park came to be. The film, however, boils it all down into a "humans vs. people" chase story where everyone lands on one side of the island (crashes) and is trying to escape from the other side. Then, at the end, they ship a tyrannosaur to L.A. and Spielberg gets to film a Godzilla movie.
It's just a terrible movie all the way through. It's not worse than Jurassic Park 3, mind you, but JP3 is a whole different beast. It's a theme park ride where science was deliberately swept far, FAR funder the rug. But we'll get to that movie another day. The point here is that I hadn't seen The Lost World in at least six years and I finally did--by accident--on TV, and decided to suffer through. I can't recommend it.