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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Jamaican-British television and film director Stephen
Hopkins’ career over the last twenty years has been checkered at best, doling
out the fifth Freddy Krueger iteration with A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The
Dream Child before taking on the underrated urban sci-fi action thriller
sequel Predator 2. Not a bad
start, segueing into 1994’s star-studded action thriller Blown Away
before taking a sharp qualitative nose-dive with his next two features, the
killer lions film The Ghost and the Darkness and 1998’s deservedly
maligned TV-to-film update of the hit 1965 television series Lost in Space which
for some reason Arrow Video once again in their dealings with Warner Brothers
decided was meritorious of a 4K Ultra HD limited special edition collector’s
set, for the film’s expansive legion of fans, you know? I mean, at a certain point, the 2160p bump on
titles like these effectively adorn lipstick on a pig.
Originally created by disaster movie mogul Irwin Allen loosely
inspired by the 1812 Johann David Wyss novel The Swiss Family Robinson,
it was a lightly comedic show about the misadventures of a family of
intergalactic space travelers struggling to survive the vastness of the universe
and featured a number of guest appearances from notable actors and
science-fiction characters like Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. Amid the remake boom of the 1990s and renewed
interest in Star Wars, New Line Cinema greenlit what shaped up to be an
attempt to revive the series (penned by Akiva Goldsman) not only as a film
franchise but as a new potential television series including but not limited to
a toy run and several tie-in novels. An
$80 million movie that took a critical beating but nevertheless raked in $136
million at the box office before being forgotten completely, I remember getting
stuck with the DVD for it for free as a bonus feature for buying a player with
a mail-in rebate as New Line was trying to pawn off all the unsold disc copies
on new customers. It looked bad then and
guess what, it still looks and even sounds bad now with the flatness and at
times garishness of the CGI and uninteresting production design.
Starring William Hurt and Mimi Rogers as Professors John and
Maureen Robinson, daughter Doctor Judy (Heather Graham), Penny (Lacey Chabert)
and child prodigy Will (Jack Johnson, later played as an adult by Jared
Harris), the Robinson family in the year 2058 on the cusp of the planet Earth
becoming uninhabitable proto-Interstellar style embark on an
intergalactic voyage across the stars in search of emigrating the planet’s
population to a new solar system. An
already dysfunctional family unit with Professor John largely ignoring his
children amid his ongoing efforts to save humanity, a last-minute change due to
the assassination of the ship’s pilot lands Major Don West (Matt LeBlanc) with
the Robinsons sparking consternation among the crew over who is really in
command. Unbeknownst to Robinsons, the
family doctor Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman in actuality a spy) tries to
assassinate the crew by reprogramming the ship’s on board robot. His saboteur efforts fail to take out the
family but succeed in throwing them off course into the far reaches of space
into uncharted territory populated with hostile alien environments including
spiders that look like a cross between xenomorph facehuggers and the alien glop
found in the epicenter of the original Super Mario Bros. from 1993 as they
desperately try to find their way back home.
Intended to be a loose big-screen reworking of three of the
show’s key episodes The Reluctant Stowaway, The Derelict and Flight
Into the Future while trying to maintain the lighthearted tone of the
original series and featuring a bevy of hundreds of visual effects shots done
by Computer Film Company and notably the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, Lost in
Space as a two-hour-and-ten-minute space opera is a crushing bore. With flat sleepwalking performances from the
otherwise usually terrific William Hurt, a fresh-off-of-Austin Powers:
International Man of Mystery Mimi Rogers trying to look serious, Friends
star Matt LeBlanc playing up cliché military machismo and Gary Oldman being
a quirky sniveling villain once again and an underutilized Heather Graham who
herself would take the lead in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, no
one is given much to do but stand around reciting lines in front of a green
screen. Technically speaking, the
cinematography is okay with recurring Australian creative collaborator Peter
Levy at Stephen Hopkins’ helm and Young Sherlock Holmes composer Bruce
Broughton’s score is serviceable at best.
In an effort to give the sci-fi opera some class and respectability,
they even hired 2001: A Space Odyssey and Aliens editor Ray
Lovejoy to cut it together into something watchable.
Arrow Video in their disc contents description for the
forgotten Lost in Space (assuming they watched a different film than I) that
it is a ‘thrilling tribute to the classic 1960s TV series with dazzling visual
effects’. They also mention something very
telling at the opening paragraph, that it’s from ‘the producers of Deep Blue
Sea and Poseidon’. While there’s some
measure of knucklehead fun to be had with Deep Blue Sea, Poseidon and
this Lost in Space are kind of insulting to the legacy of Irwin Allen
who was no artist but did create disaster porn with heart and soul. At a certain point, Lost in Space feels
like a sadly soporific full-motion-video game Playstation One or Panasonic 3DO cutscene
and seeing such an eclectic cast given nothing to do but go through the motions
was kind of sad. That said, if there is
a virtue to be had in this 1998 misfire, it’s that it is generating interest in
the beloved television series again. In
our media binging age of plowing through entire seasons of old and new
television shows, wading through the 1965 series sounds like a great way to
spend a weekend. I love Arrow Video but simply
do not understand why they keep rolling out the red carpet for titles that
render their blu-rays and their 4K discs into coasters.
--Andrew Kotwicki
