Lost in Space (1998) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Danger! Danger Will Robinson!

Lost in Space loses its way as it attempts to reboot a beloved, yet quirky, sci-fi television show. No doubt it was a fun film for the actors to make, but it comes off as stiff and a little boring in its execution. Perhaps the filmmakers could have used a bit more of a road map when plotting the movie out.

First Impressions

The trailer for Lost in Space doesn’t specifically tell you that the film is a big-screen adaptation of the 1960s television series. It shows the launch of the Jupiter 1 spacecraft which contains the Robinson family. Shortly an evil looking man, played by Gary Oldman, sabotages the ship and they become…lost. Aliens, spaceships, fantastical technology, and action moments are all promised as the trailer invites the viewer to get Lost in Space.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

On September 20, 2058 in orbit around Earth, several starfighters from the Global Sedition attack the United Global Space Force hypergate. They are defeated by Major Don West (Matt LeBlanc) and his friend Jeb (Lennie James), who sustains damage to his fighter. Elsewhere, Professor John Robinson (William Hurt) explains the upcoming Jupiter mission, which will include his family, wife Maureen (Mimi Rogers), daughter Judy (Heather Graham)–who is also the ship’s engineer, daughter Penny (Lacey Chabert), and son Will (Jack Johnson). They will travel to Alpha Prime, where they will build a second hypergate, allowing colonization from Earth through a hyperspace wormhole connecting the two planets.

After the Jupiter pilot is murdered by the Global Sedition, Major West is hand-picked for the mission, to which he refers to as a glorified babysitting job. The mission’s doctor, Smith (Gary Oldman), sabotages the ship’s robot to kill the Robinson family hours into the trip, but he is betrayed by his benefactors and stranded on the ship when it departs Earth. He awakens as Robot (voiced by original Robot actor Dick Tufeld) begins dismantling the ship. Smith awakens the Robinsons from cryo-sleep in order to save the ship from crashing into the sun. Young Will manages to reprogram the robot, as Don and John decide the only way to survive a fiery death is to open the hyperdrive without a gate. They survive, but end up somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, which their star maps cannot track.

They decide to imprison Smith for his sabotage, rather than kill him. A strange hole in space appears revealing a derelict spaceship, the Proteus. Don, John, Judy, Smith, and the Robot (piloted remotely by Will) board and discover it’s an Earth ship that has been dormant for decades, yet the logs indicate an extended search for the Robinsons, even though they have only been lost for a day. They also find a strange space-monkey, later named Blarp, as well as the navigational data they need, just as they are attacked by strange silicon-based spider creatures. Will, using Robot, holds off the aliens allowing the humans to escape. Maureen realizes that the creatures are attracted to heat and light, so Don fires up the Proteus’ engines remotely in order to fly away from the swarm, detonating the ship in orbit.

The shockwave causes the Jupiter II to crash on a nearby planet. The crew overcomes a number of interpersonal problems, including clashing ideologies between John and Don, Don’s sexually charged advances on Judy, and Smith’s schemes to get released from his confinement. Soon John believes that they traveled in time, but does not listen to Will, who has experience with the phenomena due to his award-winning science fair project. They discover what seems to be a time bubble on the planet, which contains the radioactive core material needed to start the ship again.

Within the bubble, John and Don discover an older Will Robinson (Jared Harris), who has survived for 20 years after the deaths of his family. He is aided by a mutated Spider-Smith, a human/alien hybrid created when Smith was scratched by one of the aliens on the Proteus. Older Will plans to return to the day of the mission launch and stop them from taking off in the first place. Smith, no longer under the guise of a friendly father figure, reveals he plans to kill Will and release the alien spider he can create on Earth. Don returns to the ship while John attempts to stop the monstrous Smith.

The Jupiter II explodes shortly after liftoff. Older Will realizes his father cared more for him than he thought, and sends him back in time moments earlier as the ship departs. John warns them they cannot escape by going up, so they dive through the planet as it explodes–ripped apart from the time quakes of Will’s machine–using the gravity of the exploding planet to slingshot it away. Using the navigational data from the Proteus, they launch into hyperspace!

“If there’s no time for fun, Doc, then what are we saving the planet for?” – Major Don West

History in the Making

Lost in Space is probably recognizable to fans of science-fiction television shows as being based on the 1965 series of the same name. Created by Irwin Allen, master of disaster films in the 1970s like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, also created a series of sci-fi TV shows in the 1960s. He also developed Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants, however Lost in Space remains his most popular and enduring creation. The television series, while popular, was campy in its execution (and Allen was notoriously thrifty on his shows), creating a lower budget show that shared as much in common with the 1960s Batman series, as it did with Star Trek. With other sci-fi series, like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, having received films, fan reaction for a Lost in Space movie was large. Unfortunately the resulting film nearly killed the franchise for good, as it lay dormant for another 20 years before making a proper comeback.

This film was directed by Stephen Hopkins, a British director, who was probably best known at the time for directing the fifth installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (The Dream Child), as well as Predator 2. He was joined by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who penned the last two original Batman films (Batman Forever and Batman & Robin) and would go on to write I, Robot (directed by last week’s director of Dark City, Alex Proyas) as well as I Am Legend and the 2017 The Dark Tower film. Based heavily on the pilot episode of Lost In Space, and including homages to many of the character elements, especially Dr. Smith’s infamous phrases, the show has the DNA of the original series. Yet unlike other adaptations of beloved franchises, it fails to add anything further to the characters of situations, other than big screen grandeur and enhanced special effects.

Genre-fication

Lost in Space is by nature a quintessential sci-fi story and plot. As with many other genre stories, it adapts elements of a classic tale linking them with science-fiction elements. Like Robinson Crusoe on Mars adapted elements from Daniel Defoe’s story of a shipwreck survivor on an island, Lost in Space borrowed elements from The Swiss Family Robinson and set them in a future time (the year 1997) as they ended up stranded on various planets. Their classic saucer-shaped spaceship, artificially intelligent and aware Robot, and their laser pistols, were only some of the elements that the original series played as part of the space-family design of the show. Each week they visited different planets and encountered alien races, much like Star Trek would do the following year, as they showed viewers how a family in the future would navigate life in ways similar to their own.

The television series ended in 1968. Flash-forward thirty years to the release of this film, which takes the effects and budget of a late 90s action-adventure film, casts some of the hottest actors, and creates a more edgy version of the original characters. While the production was not as cheap as the original episodes, the film suffers from other cheap methodologies: the tropes. Tropes are storytelling shortcuts that are usually clichés. The elements of the original series described above are tropes. A space adventure show would have a spaceship, laser guns, robots, aliens, and the like, just as a western would have cowboys, indians, horses, six-shooters and a sheriff. The Lost in Space film adds character tropes to its laundry list of science-fiction tropes.

The opening moments set up all the characters with clichéd attributes. Don West is the wisecracking, yet competent pilot who has the best one-liners when he destroys a bad guy. John Robinson is the dedicated scientist, whose work keeps him too busy for his family, especially his son Will, who yearns for his father’s affection so much he acts out in school. Youngest daughter Penny is a rebel, thinking her father dislikes her. She counsels Will to never fall in love with anything, as you will always lose it, until she falls for a cute alien-monkey that becomes her pet. Judy is the cold engineer that constantly rebuffs the hot young leading man’s advances, until she proves to him later that she really is attracted to him. And Dr. Smith, is the same old Smith from the TV show, but now played by Gary Oldman, who hams it up in a slightly less melodramatic way than his television counterpart did. There’s no real character development for anyone, and only the slightest advancements of a loose plot as the film seems more interested in showing off cool technology and special effects, rather than creating a real story about family.

Societal Commentary

The two elements that are the closest the film comes to presenting any real kind of insight into the human condition are the brief message about environmentalism and the brief themes about fathers and sons. Before the Jupiter mission launches, John explains to Major West that the trip is not the goodwill mission it’s being sold as. The Earth is dying and the government is lying to the people about the state of the planet. He says that recycling came too late, the ozone layer is depleted, and fossil fuels are exhausted. The trip is the last chance to save the human race by helping them populate a new world. This echoes the real-world messages that began to get louder in the 90s as the environmental movement began to take on new voices. Big budget films were there to help remind people of the fragility of the planet and amplify the message of conservationism to a wider audience.

The biggest theme, however, is the relationship between fathers and sons. Specifically, the idea that fathers never know how to relate to their kids and children often take this confusion as inattentiveness or lack of love. Will tries many different things, such as reprogramming school computers to run his experiments, in order to get his fathers attention. Even when presented flat out with advice from his son, John continues to dismiss his child as bothersome, or inappropriate. It’s not until John is confronted with an adult version of his son, that he realizes his mistakes. Normally this would have been too late, but via the rules of sci-fi time travel, he has the ability to return to the past and rectify his mistakes. He proves to Will, in a series of moments, that he is a better father now, and they can all go along their merry way.

The Science in The Fiction

This version of Lost in Space takes its cue from many other popular sci-fi films, by introducing time travel into plot. Just in the previous decade, the Back to the Future films, no less than three Star Trek films (The Voyage Home, Generations, and First Contact), plus numerous other films proved that audiences were hungry for time travel adventures. Unfortunately, Lost in Space telegraphs all their moves way in advance. The time travel elements here seem obvious to the audience, while the characters appear in the dark about the nature of the disturbance for far too long for such intelligent characters.

Other futuristic elements, like the cryo-sleep chambers have the right idea behind them. Sci-fi films as old as 2001: A Space Odyssey depicted hibernation as a way to keep humans alive long enough for them to reach distant planets and galaxies. Hopefully, real scientists would not design the comically large button that says “Cryotube Emergency De-Activator” which flashes and pulses larger than anything else in order to get a character’s attention. The production creates two interesting alien species: the silicon based space spiders and Blarp, the alien monkey. Both suffer a bit from the special effects capabilities of the day, which may result more from the budget or timeline, rather than the technical capabilities. Blarp comes off as too fake, especially in comparison to the digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or even digital aliens like Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace the following year.

The Final Frontier

As with many reboots or films making the leap from TV to theaters, some of the original cast made small cameos in this film. June Lockhart, the original Maureen, appears as Will’s principal. Marta Kristen (Judy) and Angela Cartwright (Penny) both pose serious questions to John during his press conference. The biggest cameo goes to Mark Goddard (Major West) as the General who orders Major West to pilot the flight. It was also great to hear the original voice of the Robot, Dick Tufeld, saying some of his classic lines. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, Bill Mumy (Will) and Jonathan Harris (Smith) were not invited to appear.

This film was one of a few films from the last two years of the 90s adapting TV shows into theatrical events. One is The X-Files, which is next week’s film, and another is a big budget version of My Favorite Martian. As long as there are fans of certain franchises, studios will always try to return to a property in order to garner more viewers. In 2018 Netflix launched a new version of the series, which received strong reviews and welcomed fans back to a modernized version of the show that didn’t have the same problems as the film. Unfortunately it was canceled after just three seasons leaving many wanting more.

Not every film can, or should, be another version of 2001, or Planet of The Apes. Sometimes, having dumb, fun films is just what is called for. If that’s what you’re looking for, then Lost in Space is right up your alley. Thanks for joining me for another year of Sci-Fi Saturdays. Stay tuned for 2023 as the articles complete the 90s with some of the best films yet!

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