# Lost in Space (1998)

### reviewed by
Richard Scheib

    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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