I love Conan Doyle's work. And 'The Lost World' is no exception. His narrative and descriptive powers are spell-binding, and his characterisation is almost as incisive as Dickens. As a writer of gripping adventure tales, he is certainly one of the top ten greats.
As a result, any movie director has a mountain to climb in keeping up with the standards he set.
This series portrayed the usual disparate group. They worked, but they hardly climbed off the screen in the way that they jumped out of the master's novel. Most of Conan Doyle's slyly-observed study of human nature was completely lost. The characters seemed to describe only the most striking traits of each identified in the book, and little else. Subtlty and depth, there wasn't. In fact the humans might have been the stuff of CGI themselves, just like their saurian foes, without compromise to their plausibility.
But the real goof-ball piece, the real bete-noir was the inclusion of Bob Hoskins in the starring role. Admittedly; Challenger was described in the book as disproportionately short and broad - 'a stunted Hercules'; but the inclusion of a tubby, cockney midget as his namesake surely had to be the most preposterous piece of miscasting in television history. One cannot imagine an actor less suited to play the part of a highly-educated academic, a university professor from the turn of the 19th century.
After that, they could have found real live dinosaurs and the series still wouldn't have won me back. I had only to hear the boy from Sarf-Lahndan sprinkling his dropped aitches and glottal stops all over the tropical plateau and the spell was broken for ever.
Thanks guv, but no thanks.
As a result, any movie director has a mountain to climb in keeping up with the standards he set.
This series portrayed the usual disparate group. They worked, but they hardly climbed off the screen in the way that they jumped out of the master's novel. Most of Conan Doyle's slyly-observed study of human nature was completely lost. The characters seemed to describe only the most striking traits of each identified in the book, and little else. Subtlty and depth, there wasn't. In fact the humans might have been the stuff of CGI themselves, just like their saurian foes, without compromise to their plausibility.
But the real goof-ball piece, the real bete-noir was the inclusion of Bob Hoskins in the starring role. Admittedly; Challenger was described in the book as disproportionately short and broad - 'a stunted Hercules'; but the inclusion of a tubby, cockney midget as his namesake surely had to be the most preposterous piece of miscasting in television history. One cannot imagine an actor less suited to play the part of a highly-educated academic, a university professor from the turn of the 19th century.
After that, they could have found real live dinosaurs and the series still wouldn't have won me back. I had only to hear the boy from Sarf-Lahndan sprinkling his dropped aitches and glottal stops all over the tropical plateau and the spell was broken for ever.
Thanks guv, but no thanks.