The Lost World (1925) August 27th, 2023

In The Lost World, a motley crew of British explorers, journalists, and an orphan venture to the jungles of South America in search of evidence of a hidden prehistoric land untouched by time. They’re also serching for the orphan’s father, who went missing on an earlier expedition, and there’s also an unrequented love story subplot shoehorned in. None of that matters because we’re only here for the dinosaurs.

Like most people born after WWII, I discovered The Lost World after watching The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Now I understand how much of the latter film’s plot was reverse engineered from a thought-nugget like, “How do we get the T-Rex onto the mainland?”. Both movies suffer from focusing too much time on the stupid humans. I get enough humans in every other non-dinosaur movie I watch! Just keep my popcorn warm and keep the dinosaur coming. It’s the same problem I find in those stupid Transformers movies. Why are we spending any time with humans? Get to the robots! I want cybertronian politics and operatic space epics not a vending-machine-monster pissing all over a dorm room (that did happend right? I remember so little from those films, but I know there was a Mountain Dew vending machine robot, and someone had truck nutz… but little else).

The same goes for these dinosaur pictures. The Lost World is a silent science fiction film which spends too much time setting up a premise the poster already delivered! We already expect dinosaurs; why interrupt them with a love story? The characters take a month-long transatlantic voyage to get to South America, but sitting through the movie shouldn’t feel like I’m in the first class cabin!

Sitting through the tedious love triangle plot is worth it for the stop motion animation. There’s a beautiful shot where a Brontosaurus (don’t @ me) falls off a plateau and gets stuck in a muddy river. It’s a composite-shot showing both the stop animation dinosaur and live action actors interacting with the beast. It’s all the more incredible when you remember it’s a nearly 100 year old special effect.

No one should watch The Lost World and expect to enjoy it unless you’re a bonafied film geek, lucky for me that’s my entire audience. I watched The Lost World via the Flicker Alley blu-ray restoration, unfortunately it’s not up to the standard set by Criterion and others. While The Lost World‘s presentation is steady and without molding or heavily damaged frames, the film is brutally burdoned by incessant scratches. It looks like someone scrubbed the reels with a brillow pad. The restoration techniques featured on many Criterion special features on releases like Detour, Foreign Coresspondant, and Richard III make it seem like these flaws can and should be things of the past. 

I hope we get a better restoration one day, but I’m not holding out for it. The Flicker Alley edition is the best money can buy for now. That’ll have to be good enough, but it stings when a film, renouned for its stunning visuals, is marred by an insufficent restoration.