The Lost World: Jurassic Park—or, to give it its full, even more elegant title, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (TM)—is apparently the highest grossing film of all time; or at least, it was for about a week, until the next highest-grossing-film-of-all-time came along. (Funny how these records keep getting broken. I suspect it has more to do with population increases and rising ticket prices than with Hollywood's ability to make bigger and better films.) Producers are always talking about a film's “gross”, and the word certainly popped into my mind often enough during The Lost World: Jurassic Park: in fact it must be among the grossest, not to mention goriest and most sadistic films ever to have been awarded a PG certificate in this country. There's so much violence and bloody mayhem that it makes Crash look like a mid-1970s edition of Blue Peter. What can James Ferman and friends have been thinking of?

But then the gross-out factor, the audience's shrieks of delighted revulsion, the exquisite calculation of just how much violence the kids can take—these are all part of Spielberg's peculiar genius. He's up there with Disney and Hitchcock in the pantheon of cinema's most shameless and brilliant torturers. The same goes for his way with pathos. There are some shots here of a baby T Rex being used as a huntsman's bait, tethered to the ground and whimpering plangently, which brought tears to my jaded old critic's eyes. Afterward, of course, I realised that I had been weeping over a piece of computer-controlled plastic, and hated myself for it. But that's part of Spielberg's genius, too.

The utter realism of the dinosaurs is something we simply take for granted, after the first film. There's none of the build up to their first appearance, no gasps of wonder at our first glimpse; in fact the entire exposition is garbled and perfunctory, something that has to be rushed through for form's sake. A quick dialogue scene between Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough establishes that the original island was just a sideshow, and the real dinosaur action is taking place on something called “Site B”. Goldblum decides he has to go there, for some reason (who cares?), and on arrival finds that his girlfriend—or maybe his wife (who cares?)—Julianne Moore has preceded him, and is busy doing some sort of research (into dinosaur mating habits? Who cares?) Also installed are Pete Postlethwaite, as the last of the Great White Hunters, determined to have a T Rex to fit into his trophy case, and a bunch of baddies led by Arliss Howard, who want to turn the island into a theme park. (At least I think that's what they want—but then who, for God's sake, cares?)

What follows is an unrelenting barrage of action sequences, many of which are admittedly stunning. The Lost World: Jurassic Park stands in much the same relation to its predecessor as Aliens did to the original Alien. Knowing that the mere sight of the occasional monster is no longer going to fill us with terror, the filmmakers now bombard us with the things. Dinosaurs fly at the luckless protagonists from all angles, crushing them to death, bashing them to the ground with their tails, snapping their heads off, chomping greedily, and so on. One particularly horrific scene has a man covered from head to foot in dozens of tiny, screeching lizards, one of which gnaws half of his upper lip away in loving close-up.

As the film races from one such extraordinary scene to another—most of them taking place at night, many in the rain, and accompanied by a bone-rattling soundtrack of special effects and symphony orchestra—you start to realise with a certain awe that you're watching some kind of apotheosis of the action movie. The analogy with roller-coaster rides is hackneyed but accurate. Spielberg has made a theme park, not a movie (although on one level the film seems to regard itself, laughably, as a critique of theme park culture), and the real genetic monstrosity here is not the velociraptor or the pterodactyl, but the mutation of what was once intended as an art-form into a mere machine for quickening the pulse. And by far the most scary thing about the film is what it tells us about Spielberg: that although he does seem to have a grasp of concepts such as human interest and imaginative sympathy—as the genuinely affecting Schindler's List testifies—he seems to bring just as much energy and commitment to bear on projects that don't even give them the most perfunctory look-in.

That title still exercises me, by the way. Is this, I wonder, the start of a new fashion for simply tacking the name of a successful film onto the name of its sequel? Suppose they now make a sequel to TLWJP [The Lost World: Jurassic Park] called Monster Island—will it be billed as Monster Island The Lost World: Jurassic Park (TM)? And supposing that is a huge success: will there be a follow-up called Four Dinosaurs and a Funeral Monster Island The Lost World of Jurassic Park (TM)?

What was wrong with plain old Jurassic Park 2, in the first place?