LOST IN SPACE (film)

LOST IN SPACE. Stephen Hopkins, dir., co-prod. (of four). USA: Prelude Pictures, with Irwin Allen Productions (prod). / New Line Cinema (dist.), 1998. Akiva Goldsman, script, co-prod. Gary Oldman, William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham, Lacey Chabert, Jack Johnson, Jared Harris, featured players

Trivial film, but important in conjunction with some of the films it alludes to, esp. the source TV show, Lost in Space (1965-68, an Irvin Allen Production in assoc. with Van Bernard Productions for 20th Century-Fox Television/CBS [Ency. of SF, 1993]); both are covered in the cover story on LOST IN SPACE in Cinefantastique 29.12 (April 1998). LIS the TV show was tacky and cheap and Modern, LIS the film is postmodern. Costumes include smooth, silver space suits for the Robinson family (Chris Ehrman and Cinefatastique photo: [26]). Susan A. George watched a LIS marathon on the SciFi Channel and noticed "how late 1950-60s it looked. The costumes in the color episodes are multi-colored pastels. The men's shirts are often velour. The women wear matching pastel go-go boots." The movie, in Ehrman's words, looked like it was done by "Tim Burton's folks who worked on BATMAN" in "costumes, scenery and special effects." The crew's uniforms" in a couple sequences "are strikingly similar to the batsuit"—black, heavy leather, slightly kinky—"and Don West's 'battle mask' morphs around him just as the batmobile's shielding did in the first installment of the Batman movies," and like the helmets in STAR GATE. ROBOT: "If" Ehrman's "memory serves, the LIS robot started off as a stiff, uncontrollable and frightening character. In the pilot, he almost killed the family," similar to the film. "I remember his crushing a helmet like a walnut. Later, of course, he evolved into the sarcastic robot who worked as a foil for Dr. Smith" and "was the proto sassy mechanical man that has been copied time and time again. Survey says—Modern" (e-mail, April 1998). The film Robot in one of its threatening modes looks like Johnny 5 at the end of SHORT CIRCUIT 2, which we have described as "comically (cyber)punkified"—added Robbie from FORBIDDEN PLANET + "a pretty fearsome industrial kind of robot. . . [with] the menacing look an American football player, with huge shoulders" (as the designer phrased it [Cincinnati Post, 3/IV/98: 1B]), all put on amphetamines and coming out looking like one bad-ass killer robot (who becomes Will Robinson's friend and protector again by film's end, transformed in appearance to look like the TV robot, and diagetically made into a cybernetic chimera with Will). In one episode of LIS, Robbie the Robot from FORBIDDEN PLANET appeared as guest-villain, stressing similarities and slight differences between Robbie and LIS Robot; both were designed by Robort Kinoshita (Cinefantastique 31). SPACE SHIP: In the TV series, a flying saucer; in the film, an allusion to Millennial Falcon in the Star Wars trilogy, but, the Millennial Falcon with some mutations making it less elegant externally, clunkier, and slightly more biomechanical/insectoid. A future version of the ship has been seriously trashed, adding to the interior po-mo clutter. MAJOR THREAT: Techno-organic (like H. R. Giger's "biomechanical") arachnid creatures, alluding to the Aliens of ALIENS (film) but also to the mechanical bugs in RUNAWAY and possibly to the bugs of STARSHIP TROOPERS (film). These creatures have clean lines and are relatively unmucoid (so are Modernist), but their final incarnation is as part of a chimera with Dr. Smith, which is black, ungainly, and definitely po-mo (and arguably an unfortunate use of po-mo black in a popular culture where almost anything can take on racial implications). Note paralleling of biological chimera of Dr. Smith and the arachnids (which acts mechanically and evilly) and Will Robinson and Robot (which comes to act emotionally and nicely). Note also standard images of the superimposition of the cybernetic upon the human, including a kind of VR when Will operates Robot as a kind of waldo. The imagery reinforces the privileging of emotion over reason—although practical intelligence is good—and family over more abstract values, if we allow Will Robinson's marriage of the cybernetic with the sentimental. There's also a prototype time machine in the film, and a functioning one, and a portal to hyperspace. All films mentioned here are cited in this section of the List. There is a TV show on "The Making of LOST IN SPACE." There is a 1998 HarperCollins novelization by Joan Vinge, and a Harper Audio of the novel; we depend upon the audio version for "techno-organic" (our spelling and hyphenization). Our thanks to all who responded to our e-mail queries on the TV show.