Four years after the debacle in the unfinished Jurassic Park on Isla Nublar, a British family docks their yacht on Isla Sorna and have to save their daughter (Camala Belle) from tiny Compsognathus dinosaurs. Former InGen CEO Doctor John Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough) invites eccentric mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to his home. InGen is now run by Hammond’s nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard). It seems that the dinosaurs were originally cloned on Isla Sorna but were abandoned during a hurricane and they have lived wild. Ian is asked to join a team to document the creatures in their habitat in hopes that they will be left alone. It seems Ian’s girlfriend Doctor Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already there.
Ian joins the team to protect her. He is accompanied by Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), equipment specialist, and Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughan), documentarian and environmentalist. Malcolm’s daughter from another marriage, Kelly Curtis (Vanessa Lee Chester), stows away in the trailer. They find Sarah in a herd of Stegosaurus and she refuses to leave the island. Ludlow arrives with a team of mercenaries to capture the dinosaurs for a theme-park in San Diego, led by big-game hunters Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite) and Ajay Sidhu (Harvey Jason), accompanied by Dieter Stark (Peter Stormare) and paleontologist Doctor Robert Burke (Thomas F. Duffy).
Nick and Sarah sabotage the mercenaries’ operations. They free the caged dinosaurs, which create havoc in the camp and destroy the communications equipment. Nick rescues a baby T-Rex with a broken leg, but its parents assault the trailer they are treating it in and push it over a cliff, killing Eddie when he saves the humans. Ian, Sarah, and Kelly are rescued by Ludlow’s team and they set off to an abandoned InGen base to call for help. Stark is killed by a pack of Compsognathus and Burke is killed by a rampaging T-Rex, then the party is attacked by Velociraptors in the long grass and more die.
Ian, Sarah, Nick and Kelly reach the base, fight off the Velociraptors there, and radio for help. They are evacuated by helicopter but see the T-Rex crated up to be shipped off to San Diego. Ace hunter Roland has had enough pf death and quits. In San Diego, the ship carrying the T-Rex crashes into the dock and the crew is found dead. The T-Rex is accidentally released and rampages through San Diego. Ian and Sarah capture the infant T-Rex and use it to lure the adult back to the docks. Ludlow follows and discovers himself a meal for the baby. Sarah tranquilizes the adult and Ian seals the cargo doors. The dinosaurs are shipped back to Isla Sorna and quarantined in a nature preserve by the US and Costa Rican governments.
The film was directed by Steven Spielberg and written by David Koepp, based on Michael Crichton’s 1995 novel The Lost World, which was written by request for the production. Both book and movie are sequels to Jurassic Park, but this is rather darker than the romping first film and received mixed reviews, though it was a resounding box-office success. It was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar but lost to Titanic. Audiences demanded a sequel to Jurassic Park but both Crichton and Spielberg were not enthusiastic to begin with. But finally, the story came together and Spielberg could not resist setting a Tyrannosaurus loose in San Diego.
The dinosaur hunt was heavily influenced by the animal hunt from 1962’s Hitari. The character of Robert Burke was based on eccentric paleontologist Robert Bakker. An unfilmed scene featuring motorcycles and velociraptors was gone but not forgotten. The “unlucky bastard” eaten alive in San Diego was reportedly played by scriptwriter David Koepp. The film was rich in dinosaurs: Compsognathus, Gallimimus, Mamenchisaurus, Brachiosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Velociraptor, Pteranodon, and a whole T-Rex family, many of them nine-ton animatronics as dangerous as a real dinosaur. In fact, the T-Rex parents, the sets built around them instead of vice-versa, were used to physically demolish the trailers when the time came to film its destruction.
Reviewers were blown away by the dinos, but less so by the humans, whom many called action-movie clichés. The John Williams score was less awesome and more action than the first film, and much of it came from the original King Kong. A fan-film called The Duck World: Jurassic Pond still exists as a game online. Julianne Moore did the film to work with Spielberg and to pay for her divorce. The ship, called The Venture, was named after the ship in the original King Kong. Serious trivia: the spikes on a stegosaurus tail are called a Tragomizer, named in a Farside cartoon by Gary Larson. Somehow, as in every jungle movie since the beginning to time, there seems to be an Australian Kookaburra bird off the coast of Costa Rica, but maybe it’s a joke. The Japanese tourists running from the T-Rex are saying, “I left Japan to get away from this.”