All 6 Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, ranked

2. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

While 1997’s The Lost World had practically no similarities to the Michael Crichton novel on which it was based, it was still an all-around solid film that has aged surprisingly well. After the disastrous events at Jurassic Park during the first movie, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) enlists Dr. Ian Malcolm to lead a team to Isla Sorna, or Site B, another island with dinosaurs on it where Hammond’s company InGen did most of its actual research before shipping the animals off to the park.

Malcolm is initially reluctant until he learns that his girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already on Isla Sorna, since she’s one of the world’s leading animal behaviorists. Hammond hopes to have Malcolm and Sarah document the animals in an undisturbed ecosystem as a means toward garnering enough public support to keep his own company (which has just kicked him out of leadership) from starting up another amusement park.

However, once Malcom, Sarah, and the rest of their team (Richard Schiff and Vince Vaughn) arrive on the island, they discover that InGen is already hard at work capturing dinosaurs to please the investors. Acts of sabotage lead to acts of destruction, and before you know it both parties are stranded on the island.

Like the first Jurassic Park, The Lost World is directed by Steven Spielberg, and it shows. The shots and effects are often breathtaking, and it included the debut of many new dinosaurs that would become series mainstays, including Stegosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Pachycephalosaurus, and the best Compsognathus scene of the franchise. It had a razor-sharp script that really allowed Jeff Goldblum to let loose with his trademark wit to great effect; this is easily the funniest Jurassic movie, though it does go a little overboard at times. The score by John Williams is also excellent, and different enough from the original Jurassic Park to not feel like a retread.

And let’s not forget the cliffside T-Rex trailer attack, which is arguably the single scariest sequence in the entire Jurassic franchise. Or the T-Rex rampaging through San Diego at the film’s climax, which was the only time we saw a dinosaur wreak havoc in the wider world before Dominion.

The Lost World may not have achieved quite the same transcendence as the original Jurassic Park, but it was just as much of a success in its own way.