There’s no doubt that Michael Crichton is a genius, but his particular ability lies in conception, not execution. His books are always brilliant ideas less than brilliantly written. His style is often clunky and predictable, but his ideas . . . his ideas are golden.

Jurassic Park was one such idea, so wonderful and powerful that even Steven Spielberg could not much improve on it. The success of the movie owes a debt to the great setting, characters, and situations already present in the novel. The Lost World, however, has no such genesis; it is a mere “money run” after the great success of its predecessor, and here I’m speaking of Crichton, not Spielberg. In this case, Spielberg actually improved upon the book in his movie, which contains glimpses of the core elements that made the movie much better than the book itself: the genius of “Site B,” with its wild dinosaurs not in a park context, the tension between the two brands of scientists (one which wants to merely observe, the other which wants to take home to exploit), the presence of a child (two in the book, amalgamated into one in the movie and made Ian Malcolm’s (Jeff Goldblum’s) bi-racial daughter in the movie, thus raising the stakes for her safety), the accordion-connected trailers, the clever and harrowing destruction of which was a great set piece in the movie, only hinted at in the book when the rexes simply pushed it around and the people were able to escape.