LOST IN SPACE |
| What have the following got in common? Disney’s Black Hole, Alien, Aliens,
Gremlins, The Thing (John Carpenter version), all Star Trek movies and TV episodes
featuring technobabble and time travelling, the special effects in Dr Who, leading edge
FX? The answer is that they have all been plagiarised or used in this film along with many
other films and artefacts too numerous to mention. If you insist on going to see this film
then you’d better resign yourself to the fact that every other scene will remind you
of something else and that scenes of technical FX mastery will be followed by, or
mixed with, scenes of such naffness that they would make the crew of Blake’s 7 blush
in embarrassment. I think there may have been a good film in there somewhere but it
is too late for it ever to be reconstituted. The Robinson family, for it is they, get lost not only in space but also in time, not to mention lost in plot. Let’s face it, apart from a very obvious thing that happens with Will Robinson, the plot is utterly incomprehensible. The Robinsons seem to be flung into the far reaches of time, space and plot by baddies with inscrutable plans, onto spaceships which may or may not have anything to do with the plot but look cool and have spiffy monsters, in periods of time which may be before after or sideways from the main timeline. Do not try to make sense of this if you value your mental health. Some good bits are; the casting is pretty effective, especially Gary Oldman, some of the FX are quite stunning, music and soundtrack are fine, things explode and go “whoosh” a lot, the robot is well cool and delivers some of the best acting in the film with the immortal “Danger Will Robinson, Danger!” So long as you let yourself go this is rather similar to the experience of taking hallucinatory drugs (allegedly) and of similar value. |