LOST WORLD has enrapturing raptors

Those nasty dinosaurs from Jurassic Park are still alive and kicking--this time, according to The Lost World, they're at Site B. Two major entertainment magazines made a big point of how Site B was "curiously unexplained" (their words) in the first movie. Well, here's the explanation, folks: They needed it for the freakin' sequel.

At that level, though, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a vast improvement over the first movie, which bothered me for two reasons: (1) It's a sad movie where the dinosaurs have more characterization than the humans; and (2) the movie tried to give us a lot of aw-shucks moments about the rapture of raptors, when we all knew darned well we had come to watch T. Rex tear things up.

Steven Spielberg has cured these defects admirably in The Lost World, giving up on the nature travelogue and plunking the story smack into B-movie territory. It seems that good ol' Site B is an island next door to Jurassic Park, where the dinosaurs were first hatched and are still thriving. And daffy old Jurassic Park creator John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) still loves his pets, in spite of the way they diminish the tourist trade.

All of the cheesy plot elements click into place. Off to Site B go Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, from the first movie); Ian's paleontologist girlfriend (Julianne Moore); his teenaged daughter (Vanessa Lee Chester), who manages to hitch a ride; Hammond's evil nephew (Arliss Howard), who wants to capture and exploit the dinos; a great white hunter (he wants to bag a raptor. For what--ESPN?); and many other potential dino-burgers.

What goes more curiously unexplained than Site B is how woefully ignorant (except for Malcolm) this crew is about dinosaurs. Everyone comes along for the trip all wide-eyed and smiley, and then each one of them gets a Spielberg close-up where they see a dino for the first time and their jaws drop. Well, what did they expect, anyway--the cute little neurotic from Toy Story?

And yet at that primal, give-me-a-break level, The Lost World satisfies. For all of its admittedly great special effects, the movie harkens back to the character level of Spielberg's Jaws, where the thrill came from seeing, not the monster, but how each of the humans dealt with it at his own level.

And as with Richard Dreyfuss's anti-hero in Jaws, the anchor of this enterprise is Jeff Goldblum, playing the Everyman-as-wiseacre. Some of Goldblum's best moments come from one-liners and reactions to the idiocy and chaos going on around him. If they were going to retrieve a human from the first movie, I'm glad it was Malcolm.

And just when you think Spielberg can't up the ante from Jurassic Park, the movie comes along with a wowser of a climax. I won't spoil the surprise, except to say that there's literally nowhere else to go after this one.

Advisory: As with Jurassic Park, The Lost World is rated PG-13, somewhat for language, but mostly for intense imagery of the dinosaurs and their carnage. I'd say impressionable youngerster should probably be kept away. That said, I know many Jurassic Park viewers who were well under the age of 13 and were less fazed by it than I was.