Kermit and The Lost World

Sometimes it seems like the cure for illness is almost as bad as the illness itself. Kernit's new antibiotic for her infection has given her diarrhea, vomiting and loss of appetite, so now she has a medication for nausea and another for diarrhea as well as the antibiotic, plus I'm supplementing her nonexistent diet with forced syringe feedings, and this is just day 8 of 30 days of pills ... we're not happy.

It's at times like this that I turn to escapist movies and I think tonight I'll watch one from my small DVD collection - The Lost World, a 2001 BBC adaptation of the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, filmed in New Zealand and starring Bob Hoskins who plays Professor Challenger, James Fox, Peter Falk, Matthew Rhys, Tom Ward and Elaine Cassidy.


- Professor Challenger shows Professor Summerlee a dinosaur bone from the Amazon

The BBC site for the miniseries says this of the plot ...

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Professor Challenger (Bob Hoskins), on an expedition to South America, shoots an animal that he claims is a pre-historic pterosaur. On his return to England, his fellow Professor, Summerlee (Edward Fox), and most of the scientific establishment dismiss it as a hoax. However, an ambitious hunter and womaniser John Roxton (Tom Ward) and journalist Edward Malone (Matthew Rhys) are prepared to undertake the mission to find the truth. Challenger, Summerlee, Roxton and Malone set off for a Brazilian plateau in search of pre-historic life. They are joined by Reverend Theo Kerr (Peter Falk, best known as Columbo) and his niece Agnes Cluny (Elaine Cassidy).

After finding the plateau, they become stranded and are attacked by a large carnosaur. This is later identified by Summerlee as a member of the family of Allosaur. Edward and Agnes are then chased by another through the forest. The group come across an Indian tribe and live harmoniously with them for several weeks. However, danger strikes again when the village is attacked. Is the expedition set to end in tragedy? And will the adventurers ever see home again?

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- Agnes and her guardian, Reverend Theo

I had never read the book, The Lost World, and so I was unaware when I first saw the movie, that certain changes had been made through the adaptation of the story (the replacement of the original "bad guy", a Mestizo, with a creationist Christian preacher, and the addition of a couple of strong female characters). An interesting point was made in a review I read today of how differently we think of things now than people did when the book from which the movie was made was written ... especially on the topics of race, social status, gender and religion ... and the question of if and how the original story should be rewritten. Here's a little from that review ...

One bit of controversy that dogged the production was the requisite rewriting of the story to suit a television audience. In particular, it was the rewriting of Edwardian racial attitudes that troubled some, as it was seen as an attempt to rewrite history itself. Christopher Hall was quoted as saying "Some of the Victorian obsessions and concerns are now viewed slightly differently. There are things about Conan Doyle which are old-fashioned, particularly his view of natives. We feel differently now." He has said elsewhere that the changes were for the sake of time and adaptation, but did not say he was misquoted. However, despite legitimate concerns of cultural effacement and whether or not Conan Doyle’s own complex views towards race were being misrepresented, racism or the appearance thereof has always proven to be a problem for adaptations of The Lost World. Few are the productions that even try to tackle the matter at all: the 1925 film reduced the apemen to a single role, while every other version tends to avoid it. The Alien Voices audio-dramatization took perhaps the most mature approach by simply presenting the apeman war as it was and allowing mixed feelings of satisfaction, pragmatism, disgust and sympathy to come from the characters (even if they changed Prof. Summerlee to a woman).

It doesn’t, however, say much to excise Edwardian attitudes about race while at the same time injecting an unhealthy dose of Information Age contempt for religious figures. In the interests of "political correctness", the half-breed who stranded the company on the plateau in the novel was replaced with a religious psychotic who embodies practically every negative stereotype of Christians in existence: Reverend Kerr is insane, Creationist, dogmatic and exclusionist... A solitary line in the novel about Challenger’s debate with a missionary over the effect of evolutionary theory upon faith was turned into a crude villain who all-but twirls a moustache. If religion is to be injected into The Lost World, one would at least hope that the approach would be mature and nuanced ...


- Lord John Roxton

The movie is worth a look ... the scenery is beautiful, the characters are interesting (Roxton :-), and there's no dearth of danger, courage, true love, betrayal, self-sacrifice ... and dinosaurs.


- their first glimpse of a dinosaur on the plateau