Subject: Review: Lost in Space (1998)

From: "Richard Scheib" <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 Aug 1998 05:12:59 GMT

Lost in Space

USA. 1998. Director - Stephen Hopkins, Screenplay - Akiva Goldsman, 
Producers - Goldsman, Hopkins, Carla Fry & Mark W. Koch, Photography - 
Peter Levy, Music - Bruce Broughton, Visual Effects Supervisor - Angus 
Bickerton, Visual Effects - Cinesite Europe (Supervisor - Jonathan 
Privett), The Computer Film Co, The Film Factory at VTR, Framestore & 
The Magic Camera Co (Supervisor - Steven Begg), Creature Effects - Jim 
Henson’s Creature Workshop (Creature Supervisor - Karen Halliwell & John 
Stephenson, Digital Effects Supervisor - Christian Hogue, Electronics 
Supervisor - Julian Manning), Special Effects Supervisor - Nick Allder, 
Production Design - Norman Garwood, Supervising Art Director - Keith 
Pain. Production Company - Prelude Pictures/Irwin Allen Productions.
William Hurt (Professor John Robinson), Matt LeBlanc (Major Don West), 
Jack Johnson (Will Robinson), Gary Oldman (Dr Zachary Smith), Heather 
Graham (Dr Judy Robinson), Lacey Chabert (Penny Robinson), Mimi Rogers 
(Dr Maureen Robinson), Jared Harris (Older Will)

Plot: The Robinson family are about to be launched aboard the Jupiter 
Mission to set up a hyperspatial gate on the planet Alpha Prime to 
relieve strained environmental resources on Earth. But the family is 
divided by dysfunctionality from within with the two youngest children 
Will and Penny resenting their father’s lack of attention to them. 
Meanwhile a terrorist organization has ordered Dr Zachary Smith to sneak 
aboard and sabotage the mission and then abandoned him for dead as it is 
launched. As Smith and the Robinsons struggle to stop the robot Smith 
has programmed to go amok, they are forced to engage the hyperdrive to 
stop the ship going into the sun, causing them to emerge at a point 
where they are lost in space.

And so the current fad for big-screen, big-budget remakes of 1960s tv 
series continues, with `Lost in Space' being the latest to receive the 
all-star treatment. It has been a massive hit, although as with much 
recent genre product (`Godzilla', `The Postman', `Sphere') has receive a 
middling response if not outright slamming from the critics. The 
critical response in this case is interesting with reviewers either 
tending to be condescendingly praiseworthy ("nice effects, just switch 
the brain off") or negative for a variety of reasons that seem to hover 
around something to do with the film's failure to be faithful to the 
original series. (The most bizarre review was the wholly hostile one in 
the New Zealand Listener which interpreted the costumes and the 
promotional LS logo as neo-Nazi and the relationship between Will and Dr 
Smith as paedophile).

But all the talk about faithfulness to the original series is founded on 
the misapprehension that the original series was some classic - which it 
isn't. When it began in 1965, the series was a typical space opera - 
`Flash Gordon' or some copy of a 1950s juvenile tv serial like `Rod 
Brown of the Rocket Rangers' - recast for the Space Age. But it was poor 
sf, shockingly ignorant of basic science (a basic trademark of any Irwin 
Allen sf series) and lacked any conceptual depth other than featuring a 
monster or space cowboy of the week. With the second season and the move 
into colour, the camp element took over with Jonathan Harris, supported 
by Will and the robot, becoming the real star of the show, playing to 
the camera as broadly as possible. It is the camp silliness and the 
kitsch appeal of the show's corniness today that has made the series a 
cult item. Certainly its popularity in reruns is for reasons that have 
almost nothing to do with sf. The movie has been criticized for its lack 
of humour, in taking a much grittier, more realistic approach and for 
having abandoned the style of the series. Which, if any of the critics 
really sat down and examined what they were saying, is a fatuous 
statement - any faithful approach would surely have left the film 
emerging as some science-fictional cousin to `The Adventures of 
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert'.

There was the question of which way the film would go. One had the 
dreadful feeling that it would turn out something like `The Brady Bunch 
Movie' with the 1960s po-facedness put through the brutally sarcastic 
wringer of 1990s deconstruction. And the presence, as both scripter and 
producer, of Akiva Goldsman who wrote the last two `Batman' sequels - 
which should in any book have deemed him unemployable in the industry 
again - did not exactly inspire confidence. At most the trailer gave the 
indication it would be all special effects flash and a no-brain "sci-fi" 
script. But the surprise is that `Lost in Space' is actually a halfway 
reasonable effort. It remains quite faithful to the series basic 
mythology while refashioning it into a scenario where real world 
temperaments intrude upon the absurd ideal of the perfect nuclear family 
that the 1960s series held up. Now the Robinsons are a dysfunctional 
family - Penny (in an annoyingly whiny performance from Lacey Chabert) 
is a cynical punked-out brat and Will an ignored child prodigy who only 
wants his father to spend some time with him; the women no longer stand 
about and do the cooking while the men go adventuring but are all 
technically competent and hold doctorates; West goes from the handsome 
hero to a cocksure macho jerk and in comes a good deal of overt sexual 
banter between he and Judy; we even get to see Smith actually performing 
a medical operation and Don West being the pilot which we never did in 
the series. The basic design of the robot is retained but at the same 
time it rebuilt into a heavily armoured fighting machine. There are a 
number of other touches that only fans of the original would pick up - 
Penny gets a new CGI version of her old space-monkey; or how Gary Oldman 
does a quite accurate mimicry of the craven and loquacious character 
that Jonathan Harris created and naturally gets to entangle Will into 
his schemes while trotting out classic Smith-isms like "Never fear, 
Smith is here." And of course the minor parts are filled with cameos by 
members of the original cast - Angela Lockhart (the mother in the 
series) is the holographic president whose image Will messes about with 
at the start; Marta Kristen (Judy in the series) and Angela Cartwright 
(Penny in the series) are reporters at the press conference; and Mark 
Goddard (Don West in the series) is the general who assigns the new Don 
West to the mission.

Just seeing how the film has reconstructed the familiar characters and 
icons of the original makes it quite intriguing. Equally so the film is 
filled with some breath-taking effects sequence which are conducted at 
an immensely exciting pace. The venture into the abandoned Proteus is a 
marvellously suspense-fraught set-piece. The sheer kinesis of the film 
carries it but the downside is that while the film sets itself up well, 
its last quarter act falls apart. Goldsman's time-travel plot is far too 
ambitious for the hurtlingly-paced space opera the film is trying to be. 
And further it seems only half a plot which leaves all sorts of 
questions and loopholes hanging - how does the future with the elder 
Will still remain extant instead of being edited out once the past is 
changed ? Or exactly what is the Proteus mission meant to be doing - did 
The Jupiter II travel through time or not and, if so, why didn't the 
Proteus mission? And the climactic dive through the planet's core is 
geologically preposterous. Nevertheless for the most part the film 
manages to divert one's attention well with its dark and savvy reworking 
of the series mythology and its hurtling array of effects bravado - it's 
not a bad start for what promises to be an ongoing series. 

Intriguing piece of trivia:- Did you know that the release of the film 
comes one year after the date the series set as the year of the Jupiter 
2's launch ?

Reviewed by Richard Scheib

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