Lost in Space (1998)

reviewed by
C.J HILL


                           Lost In Space (PG) UK Review.

Lost In Space is the Hollywood remake of the terrible, black and white series. Unfortunately the lessons learnt over the years on how to improve on the past have clearly not been adhered to.

The reasons for my conclusions to this are as following. First there's the plot. A modern trend nowadays seems to favour great fx in favour of a well thought out and well acted story. This is the case here. The story is that Earth's resources are almost depleted and the Robinsons venture off across the galaxy in search of a planet that's been found to be identical to ours. The mission is sabotaged courtesy of Gary Oldman and the family, along with Oldman who was trapped onboard the ship as he carried out his plan, find themselves lost in space. Ahem. How many times have we had the "Futuristic Earth out of resources" plot. Too many, that's how many. Next, the acting. With the exception of Mr Oldman, who's excellent skills are clearly wasted in this tosh and nonsense, the acting is dreadful. Next up is the awful script to accompany the bad acting. It's lifeless, dull and does not inspire any interest or empathy for any of the characters. Finally all the action and some other scenes as well are ripped directly out of other great sci-fi classics. Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, E.T, Blade Runner and even Aliens come under the hammer.

So, is there any reason to see Lost In Space? Well, one. The special effects. They are fantastic. These will induce compulsory drooling. I do not expect to see these bettered until next year, when, no doubt they will.

To sum up, Lost In Space is terrible. It does not have one original idea of it's own and even having big names in the cast has not helped it one bit. Take a tissue for your drool and an incredibly open mind for the rest.

        Utter tosh.  2/10
Review by Chris Hill.

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews