Lost in Space (Movie) 1998
I'm not sure what motivated me to revisit the 1998 sci-fi adventure “Lost in Space”. I do recall having enjoyed the movie, and the cast (William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham, Gary Oldman, Matt LeBlanc and Lacey Chabert) was a stellar selection of highly skilled actors. Together with Jim Henson's creature shop, ILM and no fewer than ten leading CG production companies in the UK and US, it was bound to be entertaining, I figured.
Ten minutes into the 122-minute treatment, the entire premise had unraveled in a pointless and unthinking cacophony of random dialogue that could only be possible if assembled from scores of preschoolers by selecting, painstakingly, the worst of the lot.
Mankind was to be 'saved' (from themselves, apparently) by establishing a ‘hypergate’, a portal through which a ship could jump. At the destination, a return gate would be constructed and the colonization of a distant planet could commence.
Enter the baddies. The ‘Sedition Fighters’ elect to attack the construction of the gate, a curious decision such a skilled and clearly intelligent faction would adopt, given that they are members of the species the gate was designed to save. Equally curious is that they would attack an experiment supported by theory that was weak at best, so the most obvious way to see it fail would be to wait. They decide to build their own version of exactly the same thing.
It would have made much more sense to simply start the movie with the family already lost in space. However, the desire to explain how they got there clearly was more powerful than the ability to do so. Getting themselves unlost by propulsion to random co-ordinates in time and space seems more like a way of getting lost, but no matter.
New Line Cinema had a lot riding on this movie. They were to relaunch the entire enterprise, franchising TV shows, movies, toys, games, the works. And then this disaster of a steaming pile of crap happened, and the cast quickly swept it under the table and New Line Cinema kissed their aspirations goodbye, as did Netflix, 20 years later.
“Surprise!” he says, perceiving a problem in noting his father's scream, terrified face and blaster pointing at the robot's head.
“Dad, chill, it’s okay, I hacked into his CPU and then…”
(pointing to the droid’s head)
“… bypassed his operating systems and…”
(points to the droid’s side panel)
“… accessed his subroutines.”
(shows a RC unit)
“He’s basically running by remote control.”
The kid might was well be saying "Ga-doh ga-doh" while beating himself on the head with a baseball bat. Maybe that's why he's a genius, he's worked out you don't need the bat. I think they should have left the bat in for entertainment value. Speaking of bats, Lacey's voice is so high only bats can hear it, mercifully saving us from the headache of nonsensical pointless dialogue.
'Okay' says the professor, 'As you know Alpha Prime is the only habitable planet so far detected by deep space recon. We're going out to Alpha Prime, take us ten years in suspended animation. There we will supervise the building of a gate, the companion gate will meanwhile be built here on earth. This will means vessels can pass instantaneously between points and establish a colony on Alpha Prime.'
So... the question from the press isn't 'why do we need a gate if we have suspended animation?' or possibly 'isn't there already a colony on Alpha Prime?" or "Doesn't that place Alpha Prime within our solar system?" or "why the fuck would anyone want to do that?" or perhaps even "if you've tested this thing, you know you can also teleport yourself there, right? "
Nope, the burning issue is "How does this relate to getting lost in space?" Phrased as: "Can't you use the Jupiter's engines to hyperspace out there?" The short answer to that question is yes, for we see (spoiler alert) at the end of the movie, it's how they get back. "No" says the professor to the attentive cadre of global news representatives. He goes on about how hyperspace is random and therefore a completely stupid idea, and therefore installed on the ship, you know, obviously.
Suddenly! the moment arrives! 'See you in hell, bitches!' he screams, bashing down the red button and FOOM, they go from random point in the Universe to their living room on Earth and the hunky pilot is missing and all the girls are pregnant.
In the end, the Robinsons were so happy to be alive that they didn't notice they failed on their mission completely, but was told it happens anyway by future baddie and future Will, so they just up and forgot about it. They also didn't notice the hyperdrive worked by failing to do what it was supposed to do. That seems like the underlying theme of the entire movie, the hypergate never happened either, nor did the sedition destroy it or make their own gate. Even the invention of time travel was somehow uninvented.
In the end, pretty much everyone was back at square one, except the baddie turned goodie maybe, who was now a spider. Told you all they needed to do was wait.
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