Subject: Review: Lost in Space (1998)

From: Scott Renshaw <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Apr 1998 06:11:26 GMT

LOST IN SPACE (1998)
(New Line)
Starring:  Gary Oldman, William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, Mimi Rogers, Heather
Graham, Lacey Chabert, Jack Johnson.
Screenplay:  Akiva Goldsman.
Producers:  Akiva Goldsman, Stephen Hopkins and Mark W. Koch.
Director:  Stephen Hopkins.
MPAA Rating:  PG-13 (adult themes, violence, profanity)
Running Time:  130 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

    Boy it seems like summer in the American movie business is starting
earlier all the time, doesn't it?  Time was you had to wait at least until
Memorial Day for the first sighting of a big-budget blockbuster.  Then
TWISTER crept into mid-May a couple of years ago, followed by THE FIFTH
ELEMENT's early May bow last year.  Now here comes LOST IN SPACE, pulling
out the big guns in April.  Yep, summer is coming earlier all the time.
And so is the holiday movie season for that matter.  Correct me if I'm
wrong, but isn't the new STAR TREK movie not due until November?

     I understand that in principle LOST IN SPACE is based on another
1960s science-fiction series entirely, the one with Robby the Robot and a
family named Robinson marooned in outer space.  In the big screen version,
set sixty years in the future, the Robinsons -- John (William Hurt),
Maureen (Mimi Rogers), Judy (Heather Graham), Penny (Lacey Chabert) and
Will (Jack Johnson) -- and their ace pilot Maj. Don West (Matt LeBlanc)
end up light years from home when the evil Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman)
sabotages their mission to colonize a distant planet.  The premise is
something straight out of the current TV "Trek" incarnation "Voyager," but
that's not the only place that Akiva Goldsman's script borders on "Trek"
parody.  "Anomalies" and "space-time rifts" appear with some regularity;
problems become something to be solved with a stream of techno-babble.
Even the extra-terrestrial sets have the vaguely cheesy Early Styrofoam
look of the original series.  By the time Dr. Smith grumbles in one scene
"I'm a doctor, not a space explorer," you may begin scanning the edges of
the frame for Paramount lawyers scurrying onto the set with 
cease-and-desist orders.

     Then again, "Star Trek" never got itself bogged down in the sort of
hand-wringing which passes for character development in LOST IN SPACE.
The television series turned the Swiss Family Robinson into the Space
Family Robinson; here, they're more like the Dysfunctional Family
Robinson.  When their spacecraft isn't being sucked into the sun or
attacked by relentless alien arachnids, the Robinson children pout over
the lack of attention paid to them by their work-obsessed father, while Ma
Robinson wonders "why we're trying to save the planet when we can't save
our own family."  Survival, it seems, becomes a secondary concern to using
the occasion for a big, forced group therapy session.  Combine the family
squabbles, the obligatory cameo by a member of the series cast (June
Lockhart as Will's principal), a villainous Global Sedition movement which
disappears after the first twenty minutes, pointless flirtations between
LeBlanc and Graham and an even-more-pointless friendly alien
monkey/chameleon/action figure-in-training character, and you've got one
heck of a loud and busy story from Goldsman (BATMAN & ROBIN), the Crown
Prince of Loud and Busy Stories.

     And one bitchin'-cool loud and busy story, at that.  LOST IN SPACE
may be silly and overwrought, but it sure looks great.  Creepy creatures,
spaceship dogfights, morphing, nifty costumes, well-crafted action
sequences -- I can't remember the last time I spent so much time impressed
by a film's bag of visual tricks.  There's even a modicum of decent acting
to season the spectacle, particularly from Oldman as the nasty villain and
LeBlanc as the thick-but-decent military man.  There may not be much to
recommend LOST IN SPACE as quality film-making beyond its technical
prowess, but that's probably more than enough to satisfy summer movie fans
until summer actually arrives.  Or to satisfy the "Star Trek" fans until
Thanksgiving actually arrives.

    On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 LOST weekends:  6.

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