Simply A Masterpiece

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame), "The Lost World" follows the exploits of Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) as he leads a team to an isolated South American plateau on which prehistoric creatures have survived. Although their often frenetic or overly melodramatic styles of silent acting dates the film, the human cast is fine but the real stars of "The Lost World" are the animated dinosaurs created by Willis O'Brien, who less than a decade later brought King Kong to life. I can't imagine what original audiences felt the first time they saw a brontosaurus walk across the screen or witnessed the iconic fight between a vicious and agile allosaurus and a heavily armoured triceratops - contemporary reviews suggest that they were astounded and impressed. Well worth watching as an entertaining, albeit implausible, adventure, or as a piece of cinematic history, or both.

Last weekend I attended a screening of Harry Hoyt's THE LOST WORLD that offered the one- hour version. The quality of the image was great and the score was performed live. And I only had the obvious reference of it: Willis H. O'Brien, who was responsible for the special effects in KING KONG (the original 1933 version certainly), worked here, doing the stop-motion material as well. I'm pretty sure I'll write *King Kong* a whole lot more in this commentary since this is similar to "Kong" in many ways. I was actually very surprised because of that fact; I, certainly, expected similarity to "Kong" but really nothing more than something technical oriented. Actually, I would say THE LOST WORLD is pretty much KING KONG. It doesn't have, however, a very iconic character (nor a sad ending); after all, it isn't titled after the name of a specific creature (here we have dinosaurs of all kinds). But don't let this confuse you dear reader since "Lost World" does features iconic scenes. In other words, the dinosaur here (the one that suffers a similar denouement to the one Kong had) doesn't climbs a famous London building, equivalent to New York's Empire State (yes, this film, or better said, the last part of it is set in London, England), but we do enjoy a really wonderful scene featuring the dinosaur at a London landmark. Needless to say, this was made eight years before "Kong". THE LOST WORLD is one of those films that are worth watching not just because they were influential. I mean, this is so much FUN! Unlike many films of this kind, it never hesitates when it comes to show you its main attraction (the dinosaurs of course) – we get to watch lots of fights between them (great and fun material) and some heart as well (there's a crazy ape- man too). I'm willing to seek the DVD of it and hopefully I get to watch the full (or just longer) version. Meanwhile, this one-hour piece was a blast and a perfect Saturday night movie! Watch it, even if it's the online version that IMDb is offering now for free. *Watched it on 25 August, 2012

Even through the distance of nearly 100 years, and cinematic developments which include sound, colour, and CGI, it is easy to see the impact which the 1922 The Lost World would have had on the movie-going public.The whole phenomenon of moving pictures was still new and, without warning, the genius of Willis O'Brien puts on screen moving dinosaurs - living, breathing creatures which have been extinct for millions of years. How can this be? We know the answer to that now, and we also know that O'Brien's art has almost been squeezed out by the greater photographic reality of the computer. But, d'you know, O'Brien's work still stacks up.One has to look at it in the context of its era, of course - a monochrome silent film from 1922 - but it is masterful artistry, and groundbreaking technically. For anyone who purports to have a yen for special effects movies, this is compulsory viewing.

Thing with this movie is that we'll most likely never get to see it as it was original intended and released as during its initial theatrical release. There are several different prints of this movie available, all variating heavily in its running time. Now days there are versions available that combine as many sequences as possible from all of these different prints that have emerged over the past decades but its still minutes short of its original theatrical released version. Therefor we'll most likely never be able to judge to movie for what it original was but the long put back together versions of the movie should give us a fair and decent enough impression of what the movie was supposed to be like.For its time this movie obviously was a big movie experience. It's the first ever movie to use stop-motion effects for its creatures. It must have really impressed audiences back then to see all of these use dinosaurs walking around on the screen and fighting and interacting and all of that. Before there was "King Kong" there was "The Lost World" and there is no denying that the movie because of its effects remains an historically important and revolutionary one. It was like "Jurassic Park" for the '20's. You can tell in some of the sequences that the techniques used are still far away from perfection in this movie but still watching stop-motion is always an impressive and extremely delicate and detailed thing, even in this 1925 movie and you just can't help to have some enormous respect for it. Its effects and concept help to make this movie a very entertaining one, especially for its time. But this is also one of the problems for the movie. Basically all this movie is a bunch of people in the Amazon encountering a whole bunch of different prehistoric creatures. There is not really much story to it all, though I'm sure that the original Arthur Conan Doyle novel this movie was based on had some more depth and story and character development to it all.Thing I also don't like about this movie is its use of title cards, especially during its first half. I don't know if this was purely due to the restored longer version of this movie that I watched but the movie extendedly used title cards for its dialog and to explain what was happening all. It's sort of annoying when a silent movie does this too much, as this movie does. When you have a good director and good enough actors there really is no use for an extended use of title cards. You can let the all of the images and expressions of the actors speak for themselves and while watching this movie you can't help but wonder if most of these title cards were even needed in the movie. You could perfectly follow and understand the story without them, I would say.But well, all this doesn't matter that much though. This movie could obviously made purely for entertainment purposes and was supposed to impress with its new revolutionary techniques and its overwhelming images. You can pretty much forget about the story and simply enjoy this movie for its entertainment, though its of course hard to still please todays modern audience with this movie.8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/