LOST IN SPACE (1998) (New Line) Starring: Gary Oldman, William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham, Lacey Chabert, Jack Johnson. Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman. Producers: Akiva Goldsman, Stephen Hopkins and Mark W. Koch. Director: Stephen Hopkins. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, violence, profanity) Running Time: 130 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Boy it seems like summer in the American movie business is starting earlier all the time, doesn't it? Time was you had to wait at least until Memorial Day for the first sighting of a big-budget blockbuster. Then TWISTER crept into mid-May a couple of years ago, followed by THE FIFTH ELEMENT's early May bow last year. Now here comes LOST IN SPACE, pulling out the big guns in April. Yep, summer is coming earlier all the time. And so is the holiday movie season for that matter. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the new STAR TREK movie not due until November?
I understand that in principle LOST IN SPACE is based on another 1960s science-fiction series entirely, the one with Robby the Robot and a family named Robinson marooned in outer space. In the big screen version, set sixty years in the future, the Robinsons -- John (William Hurt), Maureen (Mimi Rogers), Judy (Heather Graham), Penny (Lacey Chabert) and Will (Jack Johnson) -- and their ace pilot Maj. Don West (Matt LeBlanc) end up light years from home when the evil Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman) sabotages their mission to colonize a distant planet. The premise is something straight out of the current TV "Trek" incarnation "Voyager," but that's not the only place that Akiva Goldsman's script borders on "Trek" parody. "Anomalies" and "space-time rifts" appear with some regularity; problems become something to be solved with a stream of techno-babble. Even the extra-terrestrial sets have the vaguely cheesy Early Styrofoam look of the original series. By the time Dr. Smith grumbles in one scene "I'm a doctor, not a space explorer," you may begin scanning the edges of the frame for Paramount lawyers scurrying onto the set with cease-and-desist orders.
Then again, "Star Trek" never got itself bogged down in the sort of hand-wringing which passes for character development in LOST IN SPACE. The television series turned the Swiss Family Robinson into the Space Family Robinson; here, they're more like the Dysfunctional Family Robinson. When their spacecraft isn't being sucked into the sun or attacked by relentless alien arachnids, the Robinson children pout over the lack of attention paid to them by their work-obsessed father, while Ma Robinson wonders "why we're trying to save the planet when we can't save our own family." Survival, it seems, becomes a secondary concern to using the occasion for a big, forced group therapy session. Combine the family squabbles, the obligatory cameo by a member of the series cast (June Lockhart as Will's principal), a villainous Global Sedition movement which disappears after the first twenty minutes, pointless flirtations between LeBlanc and Graham and an even-more-pointless friendly alien monkey/chameleon/action figure-in-training character, and you've got one heck of a loud and busy story from Goldsman (BATMAN & ROBIN), the Crown Prince of Loud and Busy Stories.
And one bitchin'-cool loud and busy story, at that. LOST IN SPACE may be silly and overwrought, but it sure looks great. Creepy creatures, spaceship dogfights, morphing, nifty costumes, well-crafted action sequences -- I can't remember the last time I spent so much time impressed by a film's bag of visual tricks. There's even a modicum of decent acting to season the spectacle, particularly from Oldman as the nasty villain and LeBlanc as the thick-but-decent military man. There may not be much to recommend LOST IN SPACE as quality film-making beyond its technical prowess, but that's probably more than enough to satisfy summer movie fans until summer actually arrives. Or to satisfy the "Star Trek" fans until Thanksgiving actually arrives.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 LOST weekends: 6.
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