Film Review
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular 1912 novel
The Lost World presented formidable
challenges for the production team of this silent fantasy adventure
movie but the end results are spectacular. Cinema's first
convincing attempt at a dinosaur movie has become a classic of its
genre, and the method use to animate the dinosaurs - stop motion
photography - was so successful that Conan Doyle almost managed to
convince the world that dinosaurs had been discovered for real when he
exhibited a test reel at a meeting of the Society of American
Magicians. Willis O'Brien was the effects master who oversaw the
animation and would later apply the same technique, to stunning effect,
on Merian C. Cooper's classic original production of
King
Kong (1933). The dinosaurs O'Brien created for
The Lost World don't just move -
they breathe, flex their muscles and have a personality all of their
own. You'd almost swear they were alive!
Although enormously popular in its day, the film came perilously
close to going the same way as its dinosaur stars. The original
ten-reel version of the film, which ran to about 108 minutes, no longer
exists. In 1929, all known prints of the film were destroyed by
the distributor at the request of the widow of the film's
producer. An abridged five-reel version somehow survived this
purge and continued to be distributed, mainly for educational purposes;
this was later used to create the 16mm Kodascope print which became
more widely circulated in later years. In 1992, an almost
complete 35mm print from the foreign negative of the film was
discovered in Prague, allowing a reconstructed version of the film to
become available in 1997.
Watching
The Lost World
today, it is always a surprise to see how astonishingly good the
special effects are. Some of the shots of the marauding dinosaurs
are on a par with, or better than, what can be realised with today's
computer generated wizardry and set an incredibly high standard for
subsequent films featuring prehistoric or fantastic creatures.
Some of the most daring sequences employ composite shots, with animated
dinosaurs in the background and live action humans in the foreground
(or vice versa). When the effects occasionally fail to convince
the oversized reptiles still have an endearing quality and find it
remarkably easy to outstage the human members of the cast (a feat that
owes something to the fact that the protagonists are, without
exception, tediously bland and archetypal). The sequence
involving a brontosaurus (sorry,
apatosaurus)
running amok in London is more laugh-out-loud funny than thrilling,
although it does prefigure similar monstrous invasions of familiar
urban landscapes, most famously in the King King and Godzilla
movies.
The Lost World
was a triumph of the silent era and still looks pretty respectable
compared with more recent dino flicks, including
Jurassic Park (which is essentially
just a rip-off of Conan Doyle's novel).
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
No one believes Professor Challenger's claims that living dinosaurs
have been discovered in South America. Eager to make a name for
himself, a young journalist named Edward Malone persuades his newspaper
to back a mission to the Amazon to rescue Maple White, the leader of a
previous expedition, whose journal contains sketches of the dinosaurs
he has apparently encountered. Accompanied by Malone, White's
daughter Paula and big game hunter Sir John Roxton, Challenger leads
the second expedition to South America. Here, the party discovers
a remote plateau on which they encounter a bewildering assortment of
prehistoric animals. Challenger's attempt to capture one of the
dinosaurs and bring it back to London will have disastrous
consequences...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.