Subject: Review: Lost in Space (1998)

From: "Harvey S. Karten" <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Apr 1998 06:11:18 GMT

LOST IN SPACE

 Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
 New Line Cinema
 Director: Stephen Hopkins
 Writer: Akiva Goldsman
 Cast:  William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Heather Graham, Mimi
Rogers, Matt LeBlanc, Lacey Chabert, Jack Johnson

   In his on-the-money essay in the April 6th New Yorker
magazine, film critic David Denby writes, "New movies are
amazingly impersonal--a rush of frenetic images that have
little in common with, say, the heart-stopping dangers and
last-minutes rescues in Griffith, the tumultuous waves of
frenzy in Gance, the stately displays of massed power in
Lean...A couple holding hands runs away from an explosion,
or runs down a corridor as flames (or floods) chase after
them. How many times have we seen those?"

   Mr. Denby--whose essay is entitled, "Mourning the Movies:
Why don't people love the right movies anymore?"--might be
expected to look with a jaundiced eye at Stephen Hopkins's
sci-fi drama, "Lost in Space."  Or would he?  True enough,
we've seen this sort of film-making before, packed to the hilt
with all the special effects money can buy, the heroes
outracing disaster from fire, floods, monsters, and evil human
beings.  It's all here.  There's are two differences, however. 
One is that the technology in this New Line production is as
dazzling as you'll find anywhere, Star Trek and Star Wars not
excluded.  The other is that despite the slimness of the story,
you may just get caught up in the human drama of a family
who have become truly lost--not simply marooned on a
remote island or a snowy mountain peak with a chance of
being rescued by the Coast Guard or an observant chopper,
but astray in some alien galaxy beyond the help of any forces
back on earth.

   Akiva Goldsman, who scripted the tale based on the 1960s
TV series starring Jonathan Harris, sets the narrative sixty
years into the future.  The planet's technology is predictably
able to transport people to regions far more remote than our
own moon but, wonders of wonders, it's a world in which all
countries have worked out their differences and live together
in peace. The enemy now is not our fellow human beings but
ourselves.  We have savaged nature to such a degree that
the planet has only about a decade to live before the air will
be unfit to breathe.  People will not be deserting the farms
and rural areas for metropolitan areas as waves of immigrants
have done for decades.  Now there's a job that not even the
Seven Santini Brothers could handle.  Everyone will have to
bolt from the earth to a planet which can sustain life.  That
new world is ten years away given the state of power in 2058,
but through the miracle of wormhole technology, the trip can
be made virtually instantaneously.  The wormhole must have
a gate both going and coming, without which you're lost.  You
can guess that the gate vanishes leaving the astronauts
stranded in the great expanse.

   To give the story the human dimension needed to allow the
audience to relate, writer Goldsman sends up a single family
unit, the Robinsons, carrying with them all the baggage of the
brood including a sassy teen, Penny (Lacey Chabert--who
sounds like Donald Duck on a clear day); the wise-beyond-his
years Will (Jack Johnson); an egghead professor, Johnson
(William Hurt); his wife Maureen (Mimi Rogers); their cute
physicist daughter Judy (Heather Graham); with Gary Oldman
performing in the role of the (need we say) evil Dr. Zachary
Smith.  The handsome and egotistical Major Don West (Matt
LeBlanc) is in the driver's seat, a guy who after serving fifty
military missions resents being called up to take a family on
what he calls a mere outing.  That this family is the earth's
last hope for survival seems lost on him: he's more interested
in making passes at Judy, whose name he hopes to tattoo on
his back to replace those of his former girlfriends whose
identities have all been surgically removed from his body.

   Though we grow to care for this family unit, whose
members we can identify with given their all-too-human traits,
we may wind up thoroughly confused by most aspects of the
story.  Dr. Smith wants to sabotage the mission though it's not
clear why, even though Gary Oldman, who inhabits this
diabolic doctor well, announces his intentions and feelings in
Shakespearean English.  (Maybe that's why.)  A huge robot
makes an appearance now and then, more clearly
announcing its intention: "Destroy the Robinson family." 
Why?  Who knows--they seem nice enough.  Spiders show
their hostility, a friendly little E.T. leaps from the brush to
become the family pet, and Will Robinson makes an
appearance toward the end of the film, suddenly twenty years
older thanks to a little time travel by the Robinsons, to whine
about how his dad never showed him enough love.

   Director Hopkins finds enough time in this 128-minute film
to evoke sentiment ("I love you very much"--John Robinson to
his son Will); the slang of the year 2058 ("Hey professor, why
don't you give the egghead a rest"--Major West to John
Robinson--and also such futuristic argot as "Gimme a break"
and "Tell me about it"); and politically correct calls for
conservation.  All of this, however, takes a back seat--way
back--to the fx which, wonder or wonders, can be realized
right now in 1998.  A look at the massive numbers on the
production crew will give you an idea of the importance of
dazzling eye and ear: digital character animator, computer
and video effects supervisor, computer graphics coordinator,
computer and video effects assistant, gaffer, computer
graphics designer, ad infinitum.  Bill Hurt may have turned in
a more three-dimensional role in his other special-effects
movie, Ken Russell's 1980 blockbuster, "Altered 
States," but the technology which staggered the eye eighteen
years ago seems laughably naive today.  Expect to be lost in
the dynamics of time travel, a space ship transporting itself
through wormholes, fires, and the like, and even a James
Bond-like galactic battle scene to set the tone.  The mewl
"Are we there yet?" becomes especially poignant when
everyone justifiably wants nothing more than to go home.
Rated PG-13.  Running time: 128 minutes.  (C) Harvey Karten
1998