Lost and barely worth finding
Lost In Space A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1998 By Michael Redman
** (out of ****)
There are movies that are an artistic vision, struggle to get made and are released without regard to public desires. Often these are the best films ever made. And then there's "Lost In Space", the movie that pushed "Titanic" off the top of the boxoffice.
Everything about this film appears calculated to make money. The merchandising potential is obvious. Most characters look like potential action figures. Many scenes seem to exist only to inspire video games. The rest are toy designs.
The more subtle manipulation is an attempt to draw in every possible audience segment. Baby Boomers will be attracted to nostalgia for the television series. Twenty-somethings will follow "Friends" star Matt LeBlanc into the theaters. Teens want to see zippy space ships and big explosions. Adolescents have rebellious Penny Robinson to identify with. For the "Home Alone" crowd, Will Robinson has become several years younger than he was on television.
While it's no sin to appeal to everyone, such a strategy serves to dilute the product. Appealing to the lowest common denominators of several different groups satisfies no one.
Earth of 2058 is in trouble. Man has trashed all of its natural resources and needs another planet to use up. Professor John Robinson (William Hurt) is the man with a plan. His hypergate will allow the population to instantly transport to Alpha Prime, a hospitable planet millions of miles away. To achieve this, he needs to take a 10-year trip there to construct a hypergate.
Seeing himself as a devoted family man although he is too busy to ever spend time with them, he takes everyone along. Wife Maureen (Mimi Rogers), biochemist daughter Judy (Heather Graham), reluctant daughter Penny (Lacey Chabert) and boy-genius son Will (Jack Johnson) all suit up for the family vacation of a lifetime. Military pilot Don West (LeBlanc) is assigned to get them to where they are going safe and sound.
The plan falls through when Dr. Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman) is paid off by the Global Sedition, a group dedicated to preventing the hypergate, to sabotage their ship. Smith is betrayed by his employers and becomes an unwilling stowaway.
When the damaged starcraft starts to fall into the sun, West shifts into hyperspace to escape their imminent destruction. Unfortunately without a hypergate, they have no control over where they go. Materializing in an unknown area of the universe, they are -- you guessed it -- lost in space.
Based on the sixties television program (which in turn was apparently stolen from the "Space Family Robinson" comic book), the film attempts to update the 30-year old series with mixed success.
The original had a number of problems itself. After the first few episodes that were played somewhat seriously, the focus changed to "camp". Will, Dr. Smith and the nameless robot fell into one silly situation after another each week. Viewing the episodes decades after they first aired, they are entertaining _because_ they are so goofy. Back then, they were frequently painful.
There's no intentional foolishness in the 1998 version. A few years before the Millennium, we want our escapism dark. Dr. Smith is no longer merely selfish, now he's purely evil as a lifestyle choice. The warm family relations have given way to the dysfunctional family of the nineties. Professor Robinson ignores his kids and his long-suffering wife. Penny is an angry pre-teen. Will wants only his father's approval. Judy isn't much of anything. Even the robot starts off as a destructive force.
All the nonsense in the film is apparently unwitting. The story is weak and falls apart. The beginning half hour designed to establish the characters is dull and they never become real people. The time-travel mysterious plot device towards the end is supposed to contain surprises but doesn't. Supposedly the family is lost, but no one appears to care about getting back home. Director Stephen Hopkins ("Predator 2") doesn't deliver.
The acting is genuinely second-rate with rare exceptions. Hurt and Rogers are both capable of superior performances, but don't seem to even try. Chabert has an appealing punk appearance, but when she opens her mouth, her helium-powered squeaky voice sounds as if it's been recorded at the wrong speed. Only Oldman and Johnson show any acting chops.
Of course even the best actors can't do anything with a disastrous script. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (responsible for that other calamity "Batman And Robin") offers them nothing to work with.
With a record number of special effects, you'd expect that there would at least be some eye candy. But, no. The deadly spiders are a joke. The alien space-monkey that doesn't look like it exists in the same place as anything else and has no function in the film. It might as well have been an infomercial for a new toy...which is probably is.
Not everything is horrendous. There are a few bright spots. Will operates the robot via a virtual reality set-up and it looks like someone for at least a few minutes is having fun. The cameos by the original cast are fun although presumably Billy Mumy (Will) is too busy with "Babylon 5" to show up. Dr. Smith's cloaked incarnation is handled well but when he sheds the wrap, it's the same ol' same ole.
Watching the closing credits is like experiencing a bad Sega game. I was so convinced that the film only existed to inspire toys, that I stopped by the theater lobby to see if the had a "Lost In Space" video game. They didn't. Not yet.
(As a teenager, Michael Redman, writer of this column for 23 years, never would have believed that he could write these words: the "Lost In Space" television series was better.)
[This appeared in the 4/8/98 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com]
-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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