Lost World, The |
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USA • 1925 • 110m •
  • Directed by: Harry O. Hoyt. • Starring: Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Wallace Beery, Lloyd Hughes, Alma Bennett, Arthur Hoyt, Margaret McWade, Bull Montana, Frank Finch Smiles, Jules Cowles, George Bunny, Charles Wellesley, Jocko the Monkey. • Music by: Robert Israel, R.J. Miller, Cecil Copping.      Explorer Professor Challenger is taking quite a beating in the London press thanks to his claim that living dinosaurs exist in the far reaches of the Amazon. Newspaper reporter Edward Malone learns that this claim originates from a diary given to him by fellow explorer Maple White's daughter, Paula. Malone's paper funds an expedition to rescue Maple White, who has been marooned at the top of a high plateau. Joined by renowned hunter John Roxton, and others, the group goes to South America, where they do indeed find a plateau inhabited by pre-historic creatures, one of which they even manage to bring back to London with them.
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Review:
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.
Review by Boba_Fett1138 from the Internet Movie Database.
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