Okay, here's the deal. Y'all remember that old Tootsie Pop commercial, the cartoon one with the kid asking all these animals "How many licks does it take to get the the center of a Tootsie Pop?" Brother Turtle has misplaced his teeth, but tells the kid he never made it without biting, so he kindly refers the lad to Mr. Owl. The kid asks Mr. Owl, who snatches the sucker out of the kid's hand, and proceeds to find out. He licks a-one, a two-hoo, a-three, then chomps right through to the center. Calmly, he hands the kid back his sucker stick and tells him, "Three."
I'm beginning to feel like that kid must have. Not about some stupid lollipop, but with these so-called blockbuster movies. Here we go, with our presidential flash cards in hand, asking, "How many of these will it take to actually get through the crap and find a kickin' movie?" The movie folks play Mr. Owl, snatch our coin, and proceed to drown us in flash without giving us a lick of substance, and, when it's over, they tell us, "Now, THAT was a good movie." And, all we're left with is a stick.
Combine that attitude with the current endless trend, the TV-series-turned-movie, and we're definitely set up for a hard fall. Out of, what, ninety, of these TV/movies, only two have been great. Both of them from the same weak premise, mind you, but they worked. The two Brady Bunch movies have been absolute fun to watch. Why? Aside from Gary Cole's VERY scary Robert Reed impression, the Brady movies were done as camp, poking fun at the show they were based on as much as cutting their own jokes. They ride high on '70's kitsch, the cornball scripting, and the goofy plots that always involved some ultra-dramatic problem that most families would have dealt with by saying, "Shut up and get over it!" They were great.
But most of these movies are being done as some superior dramatic effort, and, we're all supposed to buy into the fact that these are serious films. We're as much a sucker as those Tootsie Pops for believing it. Maybe the question we should be asking Mr. Owl is, "How many TV/films does it take before we see one that's worth a crap?"
Well, folks, the latest to come floating in is a little ditty called Lost In Space, a multi-jillion dollar movie with an elitist cast based on a TV show that is legendary for low-budget effects and wooden-pony acting. A-one, a-two-hoo, a-three. CRRRRUNCH! Suckers again.
This time, the Robinson family, led by father John (William Hurt) and mother Maureen (Mimi Rogers), is going exploring. It seems the Earth dying fast, and the only other planet that can sustain mankind, Alpha Prime, is way off yonder. The Robinsons and Major Don West (Matt LeBlanc) set out to find Alpha Prime and build a "hypergate" to match the one on Earth. Once the hypergate system is built, everyone on Earth can just zip right on over to Alpha Prime and start overpopulating and polluting and clearcutting again. Understand so far? Good....
Dr. Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman) isn't too hip on the plan, so he tries to sabotage the mission. But he gets caught on the ship when it launches. He awakens the Robinson family out of their suspended animation, including daughter Judy (Heather Graham from Boogie Nights), who is a scientist; daughter Penny (Lacey Chabert), who is a girl; and son Will (Jack Johnson), who is the Doogie Howser of outer space. Once everyone is up and at 'em, the ship promptly goes off course, barrelling sunwards. Major West decides that the only way to survive this is to hyperdrive through the sun. It works, but it throws the ship into an uncharted galaxy. Crisis Time! The ship has to find its way back to Alpha Prime, so the future of Mankind can be saved.
I wish there were more of the original theory behind the TV show in this movie. The show was, theoretically, a retelling of The Swiss Family Robinson, where a marooned family had to learn to survive by their wits in a foreign place. Nothing like that here, thank you. Here, the story becomes second to the special effects. All sugar candy, no chewy center. Plotting becomes second to robots, space spiders, CGI body armour, and exploding planets. Apparently writer Akiva Goldsman felt no need to breathe life into anything other than the action figure market and merchandising campaigns, so his script stays as challenging as a game of Pong on a black and white TV. Lines go bouncing back and forth, back and forth, and occasionally, one will slip by to end the scene, then it's off we go, bounce, bounce, bounce, ooops! New scene....
Director Stephen Hopkins and camera guy Peter Levy chose, for some reason, to make a black and white movie with color film, too. No joke. Everything is bland and dark, like a dark alley in some gangster movie. There's no real eyesport here, just a successions on shades of black, dark blue, and some funky metallic grey that turns purple every now and then.
The casting is just as murky, too. William Hurt looks as out of place as a nun at a Harley rally. He just regurgitates lines with as little life as possible, with the occasional eye cut to make a point. Will, we hardly know you anymore. It's refreshing to see Mimi Rogers in anything that's not on Cinemax featuring her being nekkid and rubbed a lot. Who knows what goes on with Gary Oldman any more? He turns Dr. Smith into Snidely Whiplash from the Dudley Do Right cartoons, sans twirly mustache. Why beautiful Heather Graham is here is beyond me. Coming off her killer performance in Boogie Nights, you'd think she'd be primed for a little more than the "young scientist who discovers love" thing, especially with the boring Le Blanc, who seems as lost as Shangri-La playing the deadpan strongman. Chabert has a very unsettling Nathalie Portman thing going, incredibly attractive until you remember that you're ogling an underage girl, then you feel all icky weird. Young Jack Johnson is just there because the robot has to say "Danger, Will Robinson." I have a possum that eats out of my garbage that could have played any of these parts without being noticed.
If the attempt was to beat Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young to the punch and out-summer the blockbuster parade, it was a noble effort. You can see every copped idea from every summer sci-fi megabuck movie rolled into one with Lost in Space. That's the sad part. There's nothing new or overly innovative here, and, somehow, director Hopkins managed to take a killer concept and ring it out like a washcloth. You almost find yourself looking for the wires working the marionettes, until you remember that there aren't any puppets in this episode of the Thunderbirds. These are real people, they just act like puppets.
Folks, take your sucker and run. Don't let Mr. Owl chomp your movie money, just to offer you third-rate stuff and call it top-notch. Come September, this thing will come wandering into video stores with the same fanfare it's playing now. Maybe on a smaller screen, with a fast-forward button and a six-pack, this thing will look like something special. For now, it's only a speed-bump in the road to summer. Godzilla won this round, and he didn't even have to show for the fight. The opponent was too tired to play.
Image copyright New Line Cinema.
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dead on arrival