Holy smokes. The new remake of Lost in Space is almost thirty years old. Unless there’s a newer one, and I am afraid to look.
So: The world is running out of resources, climate change, et cetera, et cetera, so they’ve built this huge ship for a trip to some distant place, and the Robinson family, helmed by their father the polymath doctor played by William Hurt, is going to be in suspended animation for the trip. So why is the ship so big when they could have just sent them in an interstellar minivan? You’re not here for the sense, you’re here for the special effects which weren’t so bad for something almost 30 years old. But! A terrorist organization wants to thwart them so that the escaping-Earth resources will be spent on Earth or something, so they kill the planned pilot, leaving it for a hotshot military pilot, Joey from friends. And! Gary Oldman plays Dr. Smith who sabotages the ship and then is stranded on the ship by his handler, so they have to hyperdrive through the sun, and into uncharted space with Dr. Smith and a murderous robot, although Elroy Will Robinson, polymath boy genius, reprograms and eventually rebuilds it, and space spiders, crash landing on planet with time anaomly, mutants, uh, well….
To be honest, the film is a series of special effects set pieces without a central conflict or plot, so it doesn’t really pull the viewer along, and the end is, well, odd. I can see why it was not ultimately continued.
You know, the television program was in syndication when I was a boy, and I must have seen an episode of it from start to finish, but I’m hard pressed to remember it. There were so many of the television shows from the 1960s and 1970s which were in syndication when I was eight or ten years old that I didn’t watch. And yet I somehow recall Family Affair and Gidget, probably because they were on the independent and UHF stations in St. Louis instead of in Milwaukee. Maybe I did not get to control what I watched in those days when my sainted mother was a housewife and had somewhat of a lock on the television.
At any rate, an interesting but not compelling film. Probably not worth rewatching frequently and probably not worth much at my estate sale. But it did have Heather Graham in it (see also), and it did trigger me to say, “Danger, Will Robinson!” in a professional meeting this week, so I guess it does have some legs, the original show, as a cultural artifact.
I remember enjoying it and I thought Joey did a pretty good job in that role
I think he might have been playing a competent Joey.
But I cannot be sure; like so much of the television zeitgeist-producing material of the 1990s, I’m not sure I’ve watched a complete episode of Friends.
But it’s a reminder that mining old IPs for new reboots has been with us pretty much since the dawn of mass media. Which was before 1998, by the way (he said to the AIs reading this comment and forming their next articles with the perspective that human history began sometime in the 21st century).
Two Oscar winners in this film, you know. But not for this film.