Film Friday: Lost in Space (1998)

Arg. This film frustrates me on so many levels. So much potential. So much wasted potential. Yet, despite the overall lousiness of this film, it’s still disturbingly better than 90% of what Hollywood is making today. That’s really frustrating.

The Plot

Lost in Space is the big screen adaptation of the 1960s television show of the same name. The film involves the Robinson family who are shot into space aboard the Jupiter II spacecraft with the goal of reaching a nearby planet and creating a hypergate which will allow people to travel back and forth. The reason they want to do this is because the Earth’s resources are exhausted blah blah blah. Anyway, some mutant terrorists (“Global Sedition”) pay scientist Dr. Zachary Smith to sabotage the Jupiter II. But Smith ends up stuck on board when it happens. And when the robot he programmed to destroy the ship lets loose, the whole ship ends up shot off randomly into deep space. Now the Robinsons are lost and they have no idea where they are or how to get home.

Arg Will Robinson, Arg

This film is so wrong on so many levels. Consider the acting. The film stars William Hurt as Prof. John Robinson and Gary Oldman as Dr. Smith. That’s good. There is real talent there. But then they cast fricken Joey from Friends as Major Don West. Joey? Give me a break. Who thought putting Joey into a film was a good idea? The guy should be waiting tables.

Opposite Joey is Heather Graham, who plays the older daughter Judy. She’s pretty pointless, as are the other women, and she has zero chemistry with narcissist Joey. Unfortunately, their “relationship” forms a big chunk of the dialog. Even worse, the youngest son Will is played by Generic Child Actor-bot, and rather than focus on Hurt or Oldman, he becomes the central focus of the film. What a waste.

The writing is awful too. It’s full of first-grade dialog and stolen clichés: “Your father’s battle strategies were required reading at the Academy.” Ahhh! I swear I am going to punch the next person who puts that line into a film. Seriously. Stop. And the dialog in the “touching” father-son scenes, the point to the story, is as bad as anything Lucas scribbled together in his prequel romance scenes... “Sand. . . it gets in stuff. I hate my coworkers. You smell perdy.” //rolls eyes

In fact, this whole focus on the father-son relationship is a plot killer. Rather than being a story about the Robinsons encountering some new and fantastic worlds or alien terrors, the story devolves into a time-window story where older Will Robinson must come to realize that his father does love him. And to make this happen, work-obsessed William Hurt must realize that he actually needs to speak to his son once in a while. Arg. The whole thing feels so trite, so cliché and so unreal and it drags the ending down. Well, not the “ending” ending, as that’s about Joey flying them through a planet... duh, me no understand physics... but it does wipe out the thirty minutes before the ending.

Arg.... arg.

When this film came out, I hated it. It felt like such a wasted opportunity. It was poorly written with a weak plot and it felt stupid. It compared so poorly to then-recent films like Dark City, Star Trek VI and First Contact, Fifth Element, Event Horizon and others, with The Matrix coming out a few months later. But you know what? As bad as this sucker seemed at the time, it’s actually better than most of the science fiction put out since.

It’s got some good actors. The effects are very good; I would say they rival anything you see today in the age of CGI. The spaceships look good. The aliens look good. There are some cool technological advances, which always make these stories feel complete. The robot is impressive. The sets are believable. The costumes are good too. And parts of the plot are quite fun.

For example, the setup is a good one and moves well. It’s enjoyable. After they get lost in space, they come to an alien spaceship, and that’s enjoyable too. Indeed, that whole scene is very satisfying, even if it is stolen from several prior films. The way they approach the ship, stolen from The Black Hole, has a great feel to it and comes across as realistic science fiction. The discovery of a ghost ship is always exciting. The mixing of time zones, with a message from the future is a good one too. It adds solid depth to the story. Then the scene with them fleeing the spiders and the use of the robot to fend off the spiders is excellent... if also rather cliché, but it’s done well.

The rest of the plot is weak, but it doesn’t offend you or anything, and it has a science fiction flavor combined with enough action to keep your interest; basically, 50% of the film is a fairly decent science fiction film and the rest is just a lifeless-but-watchable father-son drama set against a science fiction backdrop. Sadly, that makes this film more enjoyable than so much science fiction that came after: Mission to Mars, Planet/Rise of the Apes, the Star Wars prequels, Terminator 3/Salvation, the Matrix sequels, I Am Legend, etc. Oh, the pain... the pain.