LOST IN SPACE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A dysfunctional family learns to get
along with each other when they are marooned in
space in another part of the galaxy. The 1960s TV
series comes to the screen with a spectacular
visual style but also with a family if anything
more obnoxious than they were on TV--not an easy
task. Just when the science fiction ideas get
somewhat sophisticated, the telling lapses into
incoherence. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), high +1 (- 4 to
+4)
Back in the 1965 Irwin Allen created a TV series, LOST IN SPACE, based on the comic book SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON, itself a science fiction adaptation of Johann David Wyss's SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON. The series lasted until 1968. In the series seven people are present on an experimental ship on a space mission when something went terribly wrong and the whole group became, well ... lost in space. The characters were the five-person Robinson Family, the pilot, and a stowaway enemy agent, one Dr. Smith, whose initial goal was to destroy the mission. The family was unrealistic, even for the 1960s in that everybody seemed to get along with everybody. But Dr. Smith was adept at playing everybody off against everybody else. Smith was the embodiment of every negative and dangerous human impulse but subtlety, yet the Robinson family never seemed to catch on. The special effects were bargain basement quality for the most part. When the LOST IN SPACE premiered, no less an expert than Isaac Asimov wrote a letter reprinted in "TV Guide" about how absurd the concept was. It was a physical impossibility to travel so fast and far in a few seconds that you could not even find familiar stars in the sky. I believe he claimed it was comparable to saying a child on a tricycle took a wrong turn and found himself in another country.
There are at least two advantages to making a film of the story in the late 1990s. The story can be presented with superb special effects. I would rank the visual effects of this film just a few microns below the quality one would expect from a STAR WARS film. The other advantage is that in these days of all kinds of theoretical holes in physics--black, white, and worm--you would never get a reputable scientist willing to commit to the impossibility of finding a few- second shortcut to some other arm of the galaxy.
In the new film version the Earth has finally conquered war and is ready to move on to conquering the universe. People live together in peace--all but some nasty holdouts called the Sedition. John Robinson (played by William Hurt) has devoted his life to science at the cost of neglecting his loved ones. As a result he has one deuce of a dysfunctional family. Wife Maureen and children Judy, Penny, and Will--nobody gets along. The world is just not as peaceful as it initially would seem. The Robinsons might almost be better called the Bickersons. But John has a plan for bringing his family together and at the same time further his work. The whole family is going to take a little trip together to the Alpha star system to set up a jump gate for instantaneous travel to that system. After ten years of being cooped up together in space, of course the Robinsons will get along. Everyone in the family recognizes this as one of Dad's less stellar ideas, but he thinks it will bring the family. Little does John know that the forces of the Sedition have an agent, Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman) who is trying to stop their little mission and kill the family. Except for the maladjusted family this is really the plot of the TV series, but remarkably when watching the film, one does not think of it as being a retread. It feels freshly re-imagined as if we are seeing it for the first time.
I cannot say I am very fond of William Hurt's acting in general. Like Harrison Ford he usually has this distant quality, as if he is just a little bit high all the time. Mimi Rogers plays a slightly authoritarian Maureen Robinson. As Will Robinson Jack Johnson is considerably more natural than was TV's Billy Mumy. Heather Graham makes an okay Judy Robinson, but Lacey Chabert's Penny is annoying and just about the last person I would want to be cooped up with for ten years. Matt LeBlanc as the pilot on the make with Judy is nearly as bad. Gary Oldman, however, is a big improvement over the TV series. His TV equivalent Jonathan Harris was a comedy actor who was miscast and never convincing as the sinister agent. Oldman adopts many of the same gestures, but makes them sinister and mysterious. And he does get some good lines like a playful allusion to the original STAR TREK as he complains "I'm a doctor, not a space explorer."
It has been a while since the look of a science fiction film has done much to excite me, but if this film has a hero, it is production designer Norman Garwood. Visually, LOST IN SPACE is very evocative of 1960s science fiction, but not of TV science fiction of the time. What I saw on the screen was what was on the covers of magazines and books at the time of the TV series. It was like the film was the result of someone watching the TV series in 1965 and then visualizing it the way cutting edge artists of the time would have. I kept finding myself enjoying just looking at the screen and thinking what a good cover for ANALOG science fiction magazine this or that scene would make. Under Garwood's design, space is a sinister place, much more so than it was in the TV series. The one false move is a cartoon-like monkey that seems like a fugitive from some other film. Garwood does a little playing around with the design of the robot, which changes over the course of the film, finally getting the crystal crown that was its most memorable feature of the design from the series. The credits list cameos from the original TV series. I must not have noticed Angela Cartwright, but it is much harder to miss June Lockhart and, of course, the voice of the robot is the same. The language is a little salacious for what is predominantly a children's film, but perhaps that is a sign of changing times.
With the exception of Oldman's performance, this is a film I would rather look at than listen to. But it does manage to take old material and breathe new life into it. I rate it a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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