Lost in Space (film)


Lost in Space is a 1998 American science-fiction adventure film directed by Stephen Hopkins, and starring William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, and Gary Oldman. The plot is adapted from the 1965–1968 CBS television series of the same name. Several actors from the TV show make cameo appearances.
The film focuses on the Robinson family, who undertake a voyage to a nearby star system to begin large-scale emigration from a soon-to-be uninhabitable Earth, but are thrown off course by a saboteur and must try to find their way home.
Lost in Space received negative reviews, and grossed $136.2 million worldwide.

Plot

In 2058, Earth will soon be uninhabitable due to the irreversible effects of pollution and ozone depletion. In an effort to save humanity, the United Global Space Force is constructing two hypergates, one over Earth, the other over the planet Alpha Prime, which will allow the population of Earth to be instantly transported to and populate the new planet. Professor John Robinson, his wife Maureen, daughters Judy and Penny, and young prodigy son Will are to go to Alpha Prime on the spaceship Jupiter II to help complete the hypergate there. Penny rebels by breaking curfew, while Will's prize-winning science experiment involving time travel goes largely unnoticed by John. Global Sedition, a mutant terrorist group, assassinates the Jupiter II's pilot, who is replaced by hotshot fighter pilot Major Don West, to his chagrin.
The family's physician Dr. Zachary Smith, a Sedition spy, corrupts the programing of the ship's on-board robot before launch, but is betrayed by his cohorts and left unconscious as the ship launches and the family enters cryosleep. The robot activates and begins to destroy the navigation and guidance systems, en route to destroying the family. Smith awakens the Robinsons and West, who manage to subdue the robot, but the ship is falling uncontrollably into the sun. Forced to use the experimental hyperdrive with an unplotted course, the ship is transported through hyperspace to a remote planet in an uncharted part of the universe.
Passing through a strange distortion that appears in front of their ship, the crew finds two abandoned ships in orbit: the Earth ship Proteus, and another ship clearly not of human origin. They board the Proteus, with Will controlling the now-modified robot. They find navigational data to reach Alpha Prime, and a camouflaging creature Penny calls "Blarp", along with evidence suggesting the ship is from the future. They are attacked by spider-like creatures; one scratches Smith, and the robot's body is irreparably damaged but Will saves its computerized intelligence.
West remotely destroys the Proteus to eradicate the spiders, causing the Jupiter II to crash-land on the nearby planet, where a bubble-shaped distortion appears. Will theorizes these distortions are distortions in time, as his experiment predicted, but John ignores his input. Entering the time bubble, he and West encounter a future version of Will and a robot he rebuilt with the saved intelligence. The older Will explains to them that surviving spiders killed Maureen, Penny, and Judy. Constructing a time machine, future Will intends to return to Earth to prevent Jupiter II from launching.
Young Will and Smith investigate the time bubble on their own. After entering it, Smith tricks Will into handing over his weapon, but is foiled by a future version of himself, transformed by his spider injury into a spider-like creature, who has been protecting Will since the rest of the family was killed. Present Will and West return to the Jupiter II with an injured present Smith and the robot in tow, while future Smith reveals his true plan: He killed the Robinsons, but kept Will alive to build the time machine, so Smith could return to Earth and populate it with a race of spiders.
John, remembering the spiders eat their wounded, uses a trophy future Will had turned into a weapon to rip open future Smith's egg sac. Future Smith’s spider army begins devouring him and he is thrown into the time portal, ripping him apart. The planet’s increasing instability caused by the time portal's distortions forces the Jupiter II to take off, but they are unable to reach escape velocity and John watches in horror as they are destroyed by the planet's debris. Having thought his father abandoned them, future Will realizes he was wrong and his father does love him, and so sets the time machine to send John back to his family, but it only has enough power to send back one person. Saying goodbye to his family, future Will is killed by falling debris, and John reunites with his living family.
Realizing they do not have enough power to escape the planet's gravitational pull, John suggests they drive the ship down through the planet, using the created gravity well to slingshot them back into space. They are successful, but the planet turns into a black hole, and they activate the hyperdrive to escape. Using the Proteus’ navigational data to set a potential course for Alpha Prime, the ship blasts off into hyperspace.

Cast

Filming began on March 3, 1997 in London's Shepperton Studios, with more than 700 special effects shots planned, done by Industrial Light & Magic and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The $70 million Lost in Space film was New Line's hope to launch a multimedia franchise, followed by animated and live-action television series. Licensing deals were made with Trendmasters for toys and Harper Prism and Scholastic for tie-in novels.

Music

released a soundtrack album on March 31, 1998, featuring 11 tracks of Bruce Broughton's original score and eight tracks of electronic techno music. A European version of the soundtrack album was released that omits the tracks "Spider Attack", "Jupiter Crashes", and "Spider Smith", and instead includes three new songs unused in the film was Aah-Yah by O.P. Phoenix, Asphalt Ostrich by Headcrash, and Anarchy by KMFDM. Intrada Records released a score album for the film the following year, and the complete score in 2016. The track "Thru the Planet" on the TVT album is not the same as "Through the Planet" on the Intrada release, but is a shortened version of Broughton's unused end-title music heard on the score album as "Lost in Space."

TVT soundtrack album

Intrada score album

Release

Critical reception

Lost in Space was panned by critics on release. Roger Ebert gave the film a rating of one and a half out of four, calling it a "dim-witted shoot-'em-up". Wade Major of BoxOffice rated the film at 1 and a half out of 5, calling it "the dumbest and least imaginative adaptation of a television series yet translated to the screen." James Berardinelli was slightly more favorable, giving the film a rating of 2 and a half out of 4. While praising the film's set design, he criticized its "meandering storyline and lifeless protagonists," saying that "Lost in Space features a few action sequences that generate adrenaline jolts, but this is not an edge-of-the-seat motion picture."
Online aggregators have tracked both contemporary and recent reviews of Lost in Space. At Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 28% based on 83 appraisals, with an average score of 4.7/10. The site's consensus reads: "Clumsily directed and missing most of the TV series' campy charm, Lost in Space sadly lives down to its title." The film holds a score of 42 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on the opinions of 19 journalists, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B-" on an A+ to F scale.

Box office

On its opening weekend, Lost in Space grossed $20,154,919 and debuted at number one at the box office, ending Titanics 15-week-long hold on the first-place position. It opened in 3,306 theaters and grossed an average of $6,096 per screening. Lost in Space grossed $69,117,629 in the United States, and $67,041,794 outside of America, bringing its worldwide total to $136,159,423. Those results were deemed insufficient to justify a planned sequel.

Accolades

Lost in Space received six Saturn Award nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Oldman. The film also received a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Remake or Sequel, but lost to the tied Godzilla, The Avengers and Psycho.
At the 1998 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, the film won Worst Supporting Actress for Chabert and was nominated for four other awards: Worst Song in a Movie for "Lost in Space", Worst Resurrection of a TV Show, Worst Director for Hopkins, and Worst Picture.

Home media

VHS, DVD, and later a Blu-ray have been released for the film. Both the DVD and Blu-ray releases contain deleted scenes.