Eric’s Bad Movies: Lost in Space (1998) - Movies - Film.com .recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding:0 !important;margin:0 !important;} Skip page navigation Home Movies TV Photos Authors Search for: Film.com Home > movies > Eric’s Bad Movies: Lost in Space (1998)Eric D. Snider · website | e-mail | twitterEric has been a film critic since 1999, and a beard wearer since 2008. He holds a degree in journalism and used to work in "the newspaper industry," back when that was a thing.
Eric’s Bad Movies: Lost in Space (1998) Eric D. Snider June 23, 2011
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?
Their space vessel, the Jupiter, will make the trip mostly on autopilot, just like the movie, but the Robinsons need a human pilot for the early stages, but they get Matt LeBlanc instead. His character is a fighter pilot named Maj. Don West, and he’s one of those mouthy, arrogant, alpha-male types who says Top Gun-ish things like, “OK, last one to kill the bad guys has to buy the beer!” These glib one-liners would sound a lot more badass if they weren’t coming out of Matt LeBlanc, but what could you do? It was 1998.
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.
The Robinsons and Maj. West are all in their cryogenic sleep chambers when Robot starts barging around proclaiming, “Destroy Robinson family!” (Robot is the type of robot who announces everything he’s going to do before he does it.) Dr. Smith wakes everybody up from sleepytime so they can help him disable Robot and save all their lives. They accomplish this, but then they’re faced with the awkward fact that they’re now stuck on a spaceship with a non-functional robot and a madman who tried to kill them. Imagine taking a family vacation and discovering halfway there that a deranged hobo has been hiding in the backseat the whole time, and now you’re stuck with him until you get to Branson. It’s like that. Oh, and then they have to jump into hyperdrive to avoid being pulled into the Sun, and so now they’re lost. IN SPACE. With a dead robot and a would-be murderer-doctor.
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 feed
| Previous article Casting a Fraggle Rock Re-Imagining Next article Review: Quarantine 2: Terminal comments http://twitter.com/ryanreeder Ryan Reeder
As 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 Donofrio
Make 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 Skyhawk
Ryan 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!
Watch the Lost in Space (1998): (No... trailerWhat's hotFeatured TrailersThe Smurfs: Trailer 2Friends With Benefits: TrailerCars 2: Trailer 3Winnie The Pooh (2011): TrailerCowboys & Aliens: Trailer
MORE TRAILERS »
Must ReadsReview: Green Lantern Sinks Like a StoneWhat2Watch: True Blood Flows AgainReview: Bad Teacher Isn’t Sufficiently FunnyUnsettling Questions Raised by the Alternate Reality in CarsJustice League: The Movie
MORE ARTICLES »
Eye Candy Brave (2012) Rosie Huntington Whiteley Jennifer Connelly Cars 2 (2011) Bad Teacher (2011) Drive (2011)MORE GALLERIES »
Terms of Use Privacy Policy RealNetworks Feedback FAQ RSS SiteMap Visit our other RealNetworks sites: Real.com Rhapsody Advertise © 2006-2011 RealNetworks. All Rights Reserved.
Their space vessel, the Jupiter, will make the trip mostly on autopilot, just like the movie, but the Robinsons need a human pilot for the early stages, but they get Matt LeBlanc instead. His character is a fighter pilot named Maj. Don West, and he’s one of those mouthy, arrogant, alpha-male types who says Top Gun-ish things like, “OK, last one to kill the bad guys has to buy the beer!” These glib one-liners would sound a lot more badass if they weren’t coming out of Matt LeBlanc, but what could you do? It was 1998.
The Robinsons and Maj. West are all in their cryogenic sleep chambers when Robot starts barging around proclaiming, “Destroy Robinson family!” (Robot is the type of robot who announces everything he’s going to do before he does it.) Dr. Smith wakes everybody up from sleepytime so they can help him disable Robot and save all their lives. They accomplish this, but then they’re faced with the awkward fact that they’re now stuck on a spaceship with a non-functional robot and a madman who tried to kill them. Imagine taking a family vacation and discovering halfway there that a deranged hobo has been hiding in the backseat the whole time, and now you’re stuck with him until you get to Branson. It’s like that. Oh, and then they have to jump into hyperdrive to avoid being pulled into the Sun, and so now they’re lost. IN SPACE. With a dead robot and a would-be murderer-doctor.