Watched: 04/16/2025
Format: Prime
Format: Prime
Viewing: Third
Director: Stephen Hopkins
As Lost In Space (1998) concludes and 1990's-style "electronica" kicks in, complete with dialog samples from the film, you can find yourself missing your glow sticks and rave-ready mini-back-pack. And you will also hear Lacey Chabert declare "this mission sucks".
It does, Lacey. It really, really does.
It's maybe not a great sign for a movie that when the heroes are all killed in a fiery explosion in what becomes a divergent timeline, we cheered.
Back in March of 1998, I was at FAO Schwarz in Manhattan, and there was a huge, pre-release push for Lost in Space (1998) which was coming in just two or three weeks. They had a life-size robot and toys with the display type I thought Star Wars would get (I underestimated). I found this guy's web-page about the 1998 display that he wrote in 2006. That robot kinda convinced me: this movie will rule!
Anyway, the trailers were fine. And after seeing the toys and the robot, I bought into the look, the chance to refresh an older property - that I had never actually seen. The casting, which included William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Mimi Rogers, and Heather Graham, was insane. Matt LeBlanc of Friends fame also starred, and that was fine. The movie also, of course, starred a teenage Lacey Chabert, which hit me in no particular way in '98 as I'd never seen Party of Five.
It's been 27 years since I've seen the 1998 movie of Lost In Space - which I last saw on April 11th, 1998*. But I have now completed the trilogy of Chabert vehicles that had the word "Lost" in the title (see also The Lost and The Lost Tree). And, curiously, each film represents a different sort of bad. A Lower-budget, silly and derivative studio pic with The Lost, a microbudget flick trying and failing to do supernatural thrills with with The Lost Tree, and - as Stuart put it - bloated 1990's studio excess, with Lost in Space.
Why the movie was being made was obvious even then. Something like pre-awareness existed for the property from the era when everyone had about five channels at most. Thus, the 1990's was trying things out, from The Brady Bunch to Wild, Wild West. The Boomers loved to talk about their media as much as any other generation, and that included the 1960's sci-fi family show. But, I was born in 1975, and, where I lived growing up, Lost In Space wasn't even on in re-runs anymore. So at 22 (I'd turn 23 the day after I last saw it), I was probably 5-10 years too young to have watched the show.
The film is such a weird relic of that particular 1990's style of "we've cracked the code!" model of writing, where people are very specific about what they're doing and nuance is for cowards. There's an almost TV-sitcom style mode of everyone getting a line, and we must have a joke, put-down, sarcastic remark, etc... every five lines or the movie will explode.
It's also written by Akiva Goldsman, a writer and producer I personally considered for some time to be a problem. He made his career getting his grubby hands on pre-existing IP and then would make it fit the studio boss's vision/ algorithm for success. I do not care for him - and with no evidence but the mess unspooling before me, I said to Jamie mid-movie "this has to be written by Akiva Goldsman" and she looked it up, and this was correct. Not many screenwriters are so shitty (see also the two non-Keaton Bat-films) that you can smell who wrote the script.
The story is a @#$%ing mess. It doesn't know if it's for kids, for people who want to see Joey in space, for people who want a climate-catastrophe movie, a family drama, a space-epic, or what. It genuinely feels more like several episodes of television condensed and powdered-dry to fit into a 2-hour run-time. Which, I guess from reading what Season 1 of the Lost in Space TV show was, is correct. But ain't nobody want that in a 2-hour movie.
Set pieces move along, disjointed and simply occurring, with no real relation to each other, and often at odds with the main thrust of the dire circumstances of what is happening. And I'm gonna be honest - that the movie wants the main problem to be "William Hurt is ignoring Will Robinson, his genius son, as he works to save the entirety of the human population", I'm on the side of ignoring the boy. It doesn't matter if he's well-adjusted if he's dead in 15 years, along with 10 billion other people.
Nor does the movie ever deal with the existential horror of literally being lost in space. Which I find odd. Like, it's in the title. Space is large. Bigger than Cleveland, even. Being lost in it has to be a major problem. But no one cares about that problem.
The characters are flattened out to the point of meaninglessness, finding ways to barely interact with each other despite the fact there's a cast of only, really, 6 humans in a confined space. They're exposition dumping constantly, but never really talking to each other. The one time we have a real, legit conversation about our situation, Mimi Rogers shows up and says "I'm Mom, and I say stop arguing, and in the 1990's, this is feminism in movies".
It desperately insists it wants to be about a family coming together, but... it isn't about that? They literally split up into boys and girls teams for 1/3rd of the movie, and problems are set up and then we're just told that they're resolved without any substantial action taken to resolve things. Will is somehow healed and in no way traumatized to learn he becomes Jared Harris, badly overdubbed by someone else with a better American accent, I guess. Penny (Chabert) invents being an influencer in 1998 while also just deciding off-screen that she's happy to be in space with her family, who is *all about to die*.
The movie indulges in the dumbest misogyny, between near-constant sexual harassment of Heather Graham's Judy Robinson by Matt LeBlanc's Don West - which she eventually goes for. And we get the the complete hollowing of Mimi Rogers' Maureen Robinson into "I'm not a woman, I'm a mom!". And, of course, shoving all the females into space suits with indicators of where you can find their boobs. Apparently properly shaping the boob is crucial in cryogenic freezing.
But nothing about the movie makes any sense. Set a mere 60 years from 1998, it supposes a future of casual space trips, warp drives, robots, etc... and where people still refer to Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny when I don't think my own 10-year-old nephew knows who the hell that is. But it's a movie about a single family being sent 10 years away to scope out a planet in order to save humanity, by somehow building a space ring? And the ring is a duplicate of what it looks like it's taking all of humanity years to build in Earth orbit. So I have no idea what that's about. It makes literally no sense.
Nor does it make sense to send a family with kids, two of whom you have to look after and aren't mission specialists and don't want to go. This really bothered me. You're dooming your kid to a life they absolutely don't want right on the cusp of their life starting, and it's some hand-wavy "but we're a family" nonsense. There is no way this is more effective than sending 6 engineers and it almost feels cruel.
Worst of all is Blarp, and I wish I was making up Blarp, but I am not. There is a CGI space-monkey named "Blarp".
For a very long time, along the way in adventure media, kids would pick up a pet that can be off-screen when real shit is happening. In Land of the Lost, we got a cave-kid and a brontosaurus. That sort of thing. On the original show, we got Debbie the Bloop, which I was unaware of til last night.
 |
| "it's a living" |
Blarp is a @#$%ing nightmare of post-Jurassic Park CGI intended to do one thing: sell toys to kids. Otherwise, Blarp has no narrative function. Blarp simply is.
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| jfc |
Blarp is technically a friend to Penny, but she never seems all that interested, and there's no narrative arc to it. Blarp is just there, making sounds. I hate Blarp.
The thing is - I *have* to assume the protocols around this exist, and it is not "yeah, sure, bring an undocumented species of xenomorph on board. I am sure it will not hollow out your chest cavity to lay eggs in your twitching corpse".
Blarp and several sequences in this movie are why I roll my eyes at the nerds online who look at the visual wonder on display in 2025 and try to criticize movies by saying "meh. The CGI wasn't good" while offering no specifics and failing to identify what's real, what's CGI, what's optical effects and what's a puppet. Watch Lost in Space, nerd-boy. Behold. You have never seen it's like in your lifetime. Behold a perfectly good Henson-puppet become CGI sludge before your very eyes!
Is it stupid?
No. "Stupid" does not describe the crime that this movie is.
I don't know how this happened. You get some terrific actors together and then hand them a script that feels like pages torn out of several other movies stapled together in a nonsensical way. That studio execs were like "yeah, the world will love this!" is kind of right in that the movie made $136 million against $80 million, and wrong in that the movie sucked, everyone hated it, and people kind of forget it exists. There's a landfill full of Blarps out there somewhere.
Is Chabert good? I mean - given what she's working with and that emo kids in late 90's movies always look like they've been spritzed with water, she's fine. As a 14 or 15 year old actor, she's perfectly suited for the part. She's more of a main character than Mimi Rogers and she's okay. But she has no one speaking to her - she talks to herself and her phone/watch. It's rough.
This is a few years before Mean Girls, so clearly had no impact on Chabert coming up in Hollywood. No one was scandalized that Penny Robinson was playing Gretchen Weiners.
The movie's one saving grace is that it's wildly forgettable.
I didn't really remember much about the movie other than the very big basics, and that included forgetting Blarp, which I hope to do again soon. I didn't remember much in the way that the ending wasn't actually much of an ending, but clearly a set-up for us all to beg for more Lost In Space. Wikipedia tells me they were already planning a multi-entertainment stream blitz after the roaring success of the movie. The soundtrack is as cool as a 1998 soundtrack was likely to get, using Fatboy Slim and Crystal Method. Because... why not?
Anyway, Lost in Space did come back as a Netflix show that I know some people liked, but I was out after an episode. But that may have been because it was about people in a contained space and I watched it during COVID.
*I saw it during a trip home for my birthday/ Easter of 1998. It was, hilariously, my second viewing. The story of my first viewing included a story fit for a 90's Fox college-hour-long-show. After the second viewing, I got yelled at by my Mom who hated the movies so much, she was literally angry with me on the way home. But back at the time, she kept insisting we see movies together, and I must have felt this was the only one she'd like
I will say anonymously that the series was good, though the last season was a bit messy
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