Dinosaurs come to life on screens The story itself is well known and remembered, Professor Challenger receives a diary with evidence of dinosaurs on a remote plateau in the Amazon, but none of the British colleagues believe it. Then he challenges the mysterious wildlife and assembles a team of very colorful personalities, going in search of prehistoric creatures.
First of all, such an old film I want to praise for acting. This is a silent movie, it is customary to overplay, gesture on the verge of emotions, convey all your feelings exclusively by appearance, not dialogue, and the entire acting ensemble perfectly falls into its images.
Wallace Beery is probably the best Challenger in film history. John Rhys-Davies was always seen as the perfect dream cast for this role, fortunately playing the role of a professor in the 90s, but Beery is even better and even more charismatic. He, by the way, by that time even in films with dinosaurs starred, a couple of years before the “Lost world” came the picture “Three eras”.
The bright cast of characters is incredibly deliverable, here an avid hunter, and a reporter, for the sake of a girl, who looked into the face of danger, and a skeptical colleague whose goal is just to refute Challenger’s statements, and, of course, a young brave girl who went on an expedition to find her missing father. All of them will soon meet with the ferocious creatures of the ancient world.
The classic of special effects in the movie Willis O’Brien created a table of convincing and believable dinosaurs that the writer himself – Arthur Conan Doyle, who not only survived and watched the film adaptation, but even appeared in it, managed to play people, later passing off the footage from here for real documentary filming of real prehistoric lizards that have survived to our days! (But “The Secret of the Loch” [The Secret of the Loch], also shot from his story, he has not seen, and probably for the better – because in the film of 1934 the Loch Ness Monster exhibited a huge underwater...) Iguana ...
Performed frame-by-frame reptiles appear in the picture quite late. For a long time, the director fills the frame with the beauties of wild America - jaguars, snakes, monkeys, boars, crocodile and all other animals. There is a kind of “main villain” in the picture – the Monkey Man in a rather creepy makeup, always spoiling the main characters.
But when the first Pterodactyl (or Pteranodon) finally appears on the screen, all the lingering expectations of the “start of action” are justified for everything! Then literally non-stop the vast majority of the picture are sketches from the life of dinosaurs, which appear before the main characters of the picture.
There is just a huge number of battles, partly even striking the cruel naturalism of its image - full of murders, pierced necks, twisted horns of the intestines from the belly, bitten pieces of flesh, a sea of blood, and finally even an erupting volcano.
Most of the battles are fought by Allosaurs. All seem to represent the same model, either dying as "documentary sketches" or successfully preying on their herbivorous counterparts. Most of the creatures in the picture are herbivores, but thanks to their plates, horns, spikes and even teeth, they do not look particularly less dangerous.
Mashapas with people are perfectly executed, ancient lizards amaze with their size, are shown by many of their species and not just fill the frame with scenes of their life, but are even able to behave aggressively towards the expedition participants. So it is not from one savage that they have to escape and fight back.
It's done top-notch. Each dinosaur has worked out the facial expressions of emotional reactions to different environmental factors, and even the process of eating foliage is not just an open-closed mouth, but realistic circular movements of the jaws grinding food. The lizards have worked out and claws, and all sorts of natural means of protection, even the membranes between the fingers on the paws of water individuals are present!
Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus - the very number of them, and some even of different sizes, for example, with cubs, amazes the imagination with the visual feast of stop-motion technology that drives them on the screen!
All the vertebrae of the body, the limbs, even the eyes — all these creatures are brought into magnificent naturalistic movements. Moreover, in the open mouths, even saliva is present, adding to the appearance of the same Allosaurs even more intimidation thanks to such a hungry ferocious species.
But still, there are few direct interactions between people and animals, and most of them relate not to dinosaurs, but to agile trained monkeys, adding a bit of charm to the film. Still, unlike the later “King Kong” and “Monsters from a depth of 20,000 sazhens”, this film can hardly be attributed to the genre of “horrors”, although the fights between lizards here, I repeat, just unrealistically over the brutal cruelty to each other.
For example, Allosaurus here manages to fight with almost all the species shown except, perhaps, stegosaurus. And the episode with Pteranodon captured right on the fly and at all remains in memory, as one of the brightest and most sudden in the entire film! But the most grandiose impressions in the “Lost World” do not even give the battle of monsters among themselves.
The picture reaches its triumph in the final climax. And not at all in the scene of the volcanic eruption and not even in the accompanying “mass” of all types of dinosaurs. These are, of course, tense moments, and the scenery of the film I want to celebrate and praise, there is no sense of wandering around the decorated rooms, the entourage of the wild jungle is simply masterfully conveyed!
But the greatest value of the picture for the whole genre lies directly in the ending. In what happens on the screen after the return of the expedition to England, took with him a brontosaurus. We can say that the first kaiju scene in the history of world cinema is the wandering of a furious and destroying all around the dinosaur in London!
Destroyed buildings, demolished monuments, evil rocks close-ups - Brontosaurus except that it manages by some miracle in the frame to not crush or devour anyone specifically. There are a number of moments of “miraculous salvation” or a number of remote frames, where the house is destroyed or the leg of the beast falls into the subway.
It seems that there are no victims, but Kong and its reptiles from the island, as well as Redosaurus, who took turns in New York, were much more bloodthirsty. On the other hand, they, as it were, were predators (Conga savages were fed with human beings), and here Brontosaurus was brought.
In any case, this is the real debut of scenes where a huge monster wreaks havoc on the city streets. London has not been so often attacked by monsters (only “Gorgo” comes to mind, unless we take into account all the tripods of aliens from H.G. Wells), and in this film, the long-necked fossil wanders only a few minutes before he breaks the bridge and finds himself in the water and begins a long journey to his homeland (which can be compared to a series of Kaiju clichés and call it their progenitor – like Godzilla’s going back to the ocean in most of his films or with Kong’s return to the island against King Kong). A masterpiece of world cinema with a capital letter!
10 out of 10
Original