Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Bill Slocum {This review is for the 93-minute "restored version}Watching "The Lost World" is like going back in time, alright. Not necessarily to Jurassic days, but to an era of pure adventure informed by sportsmanship and self-denial.What else is there to say when a romance between the two protagonists is blocked by a case of qualms over the feelings of someone else: "I can't steal my happiness from another woman" is the sort of line that feels more out of place today than Brontosaurs or Pterodactyls.What "The Lost World" is famous for is those dinosaurs, which show up here 30 minutes in and are a constant presence to the end. The technical wizardry of Willis H. O'Brien to this end is the picture's main attraction and legacy, yet even before that you get pulled in by a larkish backstory and an engaging cast, headed by Wallace Beery as the irascible explorer Professor Challenger.Challenger starts out with a chip on his shoulder: He has just discovered a hidden plateau in South America populated by dinosaurs, but no one believes him and he is denounced in the press. When reporter Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes) appears uninvited in his apartment, Challenger's initial reaction is to throttle him. But Malone calms him down. It turns out he wants in on Challenger's return expedition, as his girlfriend won't marry him until he manages to "look death in the face without flinching."The film works as a kind of Tintin story, with director Harry Hoyt presenting broad comic relief, a cast of particular supporting characters, a cute monkey, and a fetching female, Paula (Bessie White), whose father disappeared back in that plateau. I was so charmed by the story I almost forgot about the dinosaurs, until suddenly there's a Pterodactyl flying overhead.1925 was very early days for stop-motion action, though O'Brien had done this for a decade. The excellence of the monsters' detail, and the lively way they engage with one another and their environment, sells the action wonderfully. Sure, it's primitive, but like other reviewers here note, the action is more authentic than many films of a much later age.But just as "Lost World" pioneers special effects, it pioneers something less positive: How special effects overtake a movie to the point of insensibility.Hoyt surrenders his focus on the actors and the story, slender as they are, to give most of the attention to the dinosaurs. This works to the extent O'Brien keeps things interesting, with a series of dino- battles and, later, a volcanic eruption. But as the characters retreat more into the background, seen pointing and exclaiming and little else, something important is lost. What was a story devolves into spectacle.Only twice does the dinosaur action connect with the rest of the story. The first time, when a pesty Allosaurus with a Tony Montana complex shows up at the explorers' campsite, is the highlight of the movie, its eyes lighting up eeriely as it pokes its head through the surrounding trees. The second time, involving a brontosaurus taking out the site of a famous nursery rhyme, is thrilling to watch but, from a story perspective, completely nonsensical and anticlimactic."The Lost World" offers fantastic moments and much promise, but deserves praise mostly for giving O'Brien his first big stage. He delivers in such a way time loses meaning in two directions, both by recreating prehistoric life and sustaining century-old cinematic thrills.

bkoganbing If I could write in my review that the 1960 version of The Lost World was in need of a remake with computer generated dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, than certainly it would hold true for this silent version from 1925. It doesn't detract however from the fact that audiences marveled at this one in the theaters during that year.When talkies arrived no one would have ever cast Wallace Beery as Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor George Challenger. Beery is unrecognizable beneath that bushy head and heavy beard. Claude Rains from 1960 was definitely Conan Doyle's idea of Challenger. Beery has gotten possession of a diary from Bessie Love's father who was marooned on a plateau in the still unexplored areas of the Amazon tributary headwaters. He claims through that diary that dinosaurs roam that area only to be met with derision. In fact Beery's special almost pathological hate is reserved for the press.But through the press, Edward Hughes's newspaper, an expedition is financed and it consists of Beery, Hughes, Love, Lewis Stone as a celebrated big game hunter and Arthur Hoyt who is Challenger's scientific rival and chief critic.The animated special effects are state of the art in 1925 and are pretty good even today. The plateau is all that the diary claims and more. Beery and company even bring back a large souvenir from the place and it wreaks as much havoc on London as King Kong did in New York. Wouldn't be surprised if Meriam C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack got their idea for King Kong from the Lost World.The Lost World is ancient and dated, but still good viewing.

Neil Welch 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.

zardoz-13 Long before Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" astonished audiences by releasing dinosaurs to rampage around Southern California, co-directors Harry O. Hoyt and William Dowling had beaten them to the punch with their 1925, black and white silent movie dinosaur saga "The Lost World" where a brontosaurus creates havoc in metropolitan London. In truth, the silent film "The Lost World" qualifies as the first live-action dinosaur epic. The ingenious filmmakers blended shots of actual flesh-and-blood actors with scenes of model dinosaurs tromping through the jungle by means of the static matte and the traveling matte so that both appear to be interacting at the same time. The first special effects guru, Willis O'Brien, paved the way for future classics with his pioneering efforts in stop-motion animation with which he achieved greater and more enduring success in 1933 with "King Kong." Although time has not been kind to it, "The Lost World" still ranks as the best adaptation of author A. Conan Doyle's science fiction novella. Incidentally, this is the same Doyle who wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Until David Shepard of Film Preservation Associates restored "The Lost World," this landmark opus has been shown in prints that eliminated about a third of its actual length. The egregious public domain versions average about an hour, while the Image DVD restoration boasts 93 minutes. Experts have estimated that the original running time of the film was about ten minutes longer that this restored version. Again, the claim to fame here is that "The Lost World" not only beat the "Jurassic Park" sequel to the punch, but it also predated the seminal Japanese monster flick "Godzilla" as well as "King Kong." Everybody who has produced a fictional dinosaur film owes a debt of gratitude to Hoyt and Dowling as well as O'Brien and his behind-the-scenes collaborator, Mexican sculptor Marcel Delgado, who carved the miniature dinosaurs for him. Ironically, during the production of "The Lost World," the suits at First National Studios didn't believe that O'Brien's ground-breaking technical innovations would fare as well as they did. Mind you, this wasn't the first time that O'Brien played around with miniature dinosaurs. O'Brien engineered the effects for the 1918 film "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain," that some would argue was the original "feature-length" dinosaur movie. Reportedly, not only did Doyle see a print of "The Lost World" but he also liked it! According to the archivists at Turner Classic Movies, "The Lost World" was "the first in-flight movie, shown on an Imperial Airways flight in a converted Handley-Page bomber from London, UK, to Paris, France, in April 1925."