The Lost World

Jurassic Park was a science fiction film that broke box office records. It was not surprising, therefore, that a sequel was produced: The Lost World.

The technology of the films is staggering. It is difficult to look at the film and believe that the dinosaurs are not real, just super-imposed computer graphics. To the reviewer, this was the pleasurable part of the films! The Lost World is really a rerun of Jurassic Park with a different storyline. The violence is still there. The characters are essentially the same. The dinosaurs are ones that survived the trauma of the first film by being raised in seclusion on another uninhabited island, not yet invaded by human beings.

Michael Crichton, the author of the books, is apparently a New Age follower and his books are, to quote Dennis McCallum (The death of truth, Bethany House Publishers, 1996), 'a powerful polemic against the arrogance of human technology, pretended truth claims and so-called progress at the expense of nature'. This is not to dismiss his message as wholly irrelevant. An evolutionary scenario is assumed in the film, including the development of birds from dinosaurs, though recent scientific research has increased doubts about this claim.

Naturally, many people have asked questions about dinosaurs as a result of these reconstructions. Occasionally, one still gets Christians asking if they really existed. The answer is an undoubted 'yes'. However, we have to appreciate that much of what we read and see is guesswork (often intelligent) arising from fossil evidence. We do not know the colour of their skin, we do not know what noise they made. We do not know how much antagonism there was between them and man. But then the question arises for the Bible-believer: 'Did they and man co-exist?'.

The first film describes their formation by cloning ancient DNA. This is extreme science fiction, but it is amazingly current in its implications. We have heard about the recent cloning experiments on sheep and we are reminded through the film of the ethical problems of this. One problem which the fictional scheme ignored is that DNA is not intact after death. It rapidly disintegrates into smaller fragments from which it is impossible to produce a clone. Additionally, as was pointed out with the first release, we cannot expect to find any DNA, even fragmentary, in ancient material since it completely self-destructs within 10,000 years. Dinosaurs are, of course, much older according to the evolutionary model.

It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. The strange thing here is that at the time the first film was released, several groups were extracting the impossible: DNA segments from ancient fossils. This raises the interesting question concerning the age of the fossils. Are the fossils much younger than claimed or is our basic chemical understanding wrong? To the evolutionist, clearly the world is much older and attempts are being made to explain the survival of the DNA. However, recent experiments have resulted in the extraction of protein and blood cells from dinosaur bones. To answer the question as to how dinosaurs fit into the young earth model of the creationists would require more space than this review allows. An article on this will be published in the autumn issue of Origins, the journal of the Biblical Creation Society.

Probably The Lost World will have less impact than its predecessor, but certain things will remain in the mind of the viewer, not least the violence of the creatures and the incompetence of scientists. The more subtle influences of evolutionary theory and godless thinking will be there as well. But Christian parents and teachers may find it a useful discussion starter because many (most?) youngsters will see it.

John Peet

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