Remember your favorite science-fiction TV show from the 1960s? No, not Star Trek or The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits or The Time Tunnel or My Favorite Martian or The Jetsons or It’s About Time or Land of the Giants or Dr. Who or The Invaders or The Prisoner or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or The Wild Wild West. The other one. Lost in Space! Back in the 1990s, when Hollywood was rummaging around in its attic looking for old TV shows to turn into movies, somebody found Lost in Space lying under a pile of I Dream of Jeannie and said, “Hey, I bet we could spend a lot of money to make this into a sharp-looking but very stupid movie!”
And it was so. The Lost in Space movie is now best-known for being the film that dislodged Titanic from the top spot at the box office after 15 weeks at No. 1. In the realm of trivia, Lost in Space is the Nancy Zerg to Titanic‘s Ken Jennings.
The film is set in 2058, at a time when the inhabitants of Earth have just about figured out how to colonize other planets. The problem is that it takes 10 years of space travel to get to the nearest habitable planet, plus you have to be at the airport like three hours early. To alleviate this problem, scientists are building a hypergate, which is like a regular gate only really, really excited. You’ll enter the hypergate just above Earth, and come out of it a second later at the corresponding hypergate at the new planet, because of Science.
But first someone has to take that 10-year trip and oversee the building of the other hypergate. Thus begins our story (finally)! Brilliant scientist Prof. John Robinson (William Hurt) has volunteered to make the journey, on the condition that he be allowed to take his wife and kids with him, which it seems like would defeat the purpose of taking a 10-year work trip, but whatever. His wife, Maureen (Mimi Rogers), is also a brilliant scientist, and so is their oldest daughter, Judy (Heather Graham). Their little boy, Will (Jack Johnson, but not the singer) is a budding science nerd in his own right. That leaves only teenage Penny (Lacey Chabert), the middle child, to disappoint everyone by being uninterested in space exploration. In fact, old party-pooper Penny doesn’t even WANT to spend 10 years of her youth stuck with her family in cryogenic sleep on a spaceship, never to see Earth again. Ugh, what is she, a communist?
Maj. West doesn’t want to be on this boring journey on this boring ship, but he does want to make sexytimes with Judy Robinson, even though she’s the boss’s daughter. Judy thinks he’s a doofus, so they engage in ceaseless wry banter like this:
MAJOR WEST: [before doing something dangerous] I’m thinking this is your “kiss for luck” situation.
JUDY ROBINSON: Thinking. Not your strong point, is it?
It is just like watching a screwball comedy from the 1930s, if instead of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn it starred Matt LeBlanc and Heather Graham and was written by people fired from the writing staff of Yes, Dear.
Meanwhile, the medical adviser for the journey is Dr. Smith (possibly an alias), played by Gary Oldman, who at the time was still Gary Relativelyyoungman. Dr. Smith has taken a bribe from some bad guys to sabotage the Jupiter mission, as this will enable a rival space-exploration alliance to build the hypergate first. His plan is to program the ship’s robot, named Robot, to wait until the Jupiter is in space, kill everybody onboard, then blow up the ship. Unfortunately for Dr. Smith, he isn’t able to disembark before the ship launches, and is therefore stuck on a vessel that is now scheduled to have all its inhabitants murdered in a few hours. You can tell Dr. Smith does not have a lot of experience planning terrorist attacks.
Well, this all sounds like a scenario for some thrilling action! Thrilling action is what you’d be expecting, though, and Hollywood likes to keep you on your toes by giving you the opposite of what you expect, so instead it’s lukewarm and dull and brimming with lame adventures, and Matt LeBlanc never stops saying dumb, glib things. It’s like they wanted to make an adventure movie with some comic elements, but instead made a boring movie with some annoying elements. You know there’s no hope for success when the Robinsons encounter an abandoned spaceship populated by alien spiders and a CGI space monkey, which they adopt as a pet. The words “CGI space monkey” alone should have been a red flag to the studio executives. “Not a lot of good movies with CGI space monkeys, are there?” someone should have said. “Does the CGI space monkey affect the story in any way?” someone else should have said. You have to ask tough questions when it comes to CGI space monkeys, and it seems like nobody is willing to ask those questions anymore, and that is why we are losing the space race to the Chinese.
Comments | Subscribe to "movies" RSS feedAs I recall, wasn’t this about the first major motion picture to have a major CGI character? (Jar-Jar was still a year away).
Also, as I recall, this was one of the films of which Eric didn’t write a review in his early days as a critic. Glad to see him making up for that earlier neglect.
http://twitter.com/donof Rob DonofrioMake sure everyone checks out Eric’s personal website. If everyone does it after reading this- Ericdsnider.com could be the answer to a future trivia question: What website knocked Google.com from being number 1 on Alexa? (never to make the top 100 again)
http://twitter.com/Agrilla A. Gorilla“It is just like watching a screwball comedy from the 1930s, if instead
of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn it starred Matt LeBlanc and Heather
Graham and was written by people fired from the writing staff of Yes, Dear.”
I believe the kids are saying, “oh snap!”
What do you mean they aren’t? Get off my lawn.
Argus SkyhawkRyan Reeder: The movie DragonHeart had the all-CGI character of Draco back in 1996. That was why I was annoyed in 1999 when so many were saying that Jar-Jar was cinema’s first all-CGI character.
Craig Stiles“Gary Relativelyyoungman”
I can’t explain why I laughed the most at the dumbest joke in the article
Good stuff as always, Eric!
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