The Deconstructionist: A Misplaced, Perhaps Even Lost Affection
It’s a big-screen adaptation of a 1970’s tv show! Don’t look at it, Marion!
If you are someone who watches a lot of movies, it may be inevitable that you establish a list of films that you feel certain affection for, even if those films have no redeeming qualities. It might be ‘Beastmaster’, or ‘Dreamscape’ or even ‘Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,’ but most of us have a celluloid skeleton in our closets, a film we can’t possibly defend but we try to anyway.
For me, ‘Lost in Space’ is just such a film. I had seen it once years ago when I first came out on video, just a curiosity, as I never much cared for the original series. The film didn’t leave much of a mark on me then but now that it is available as part of my cable company’s on demand menu, I’ve watched it three times.
‘Lost in Space’, stars William Hurt, Gary Oldham, Matt LeBlanc, Heather Graham, the guy who did the voice for the robot in the first movie, Mimi Rodgers, a not very good child actor, a 16 year-old Lacey Chabert playing a 13-year old girl, a smattering of the original cast, a CGI monkey that the Onion described as ‘a cross between a leech and a boiled howler monkey,’ some incredibly bizarre and confusing art direction, all helmed by the guy who previously brought us ‘Predator 2’ and who would later give us ‘The Reaping.’
I’m not the kind of guy who believes that everyone should see every bad movie, but I do believe that some bad films achieve such a spectacular degree of awfulness that they become the metaphorical train-wreck we hear so much about when discussing failed projects. Other films serve as a time capsule of the age in which they were made, and few films speak so clearly of the late 90’s than Lost in Space (when Gary Oldham was a way to class a film up and the cast of ‘Friends’ were fair game for major motion pictures). Lastly, it’s terrifying to see all the underling sexual weirdness of the original television ballooned up to x-rated cartoon proportions. In a way, the Lost in Space remake is to the TV show what the porno remakes of a genuine film are to the Oscar winners they imitate - the ‘Sucking Private Ryan’ or ‘Riding Miss Daisy’ - but here the graphic sex is replaced by equally graphic set design, innuendo and awfulness.
I suppose the place to begin is with the incredible incongruity between the design and the intention of the film. The spaceships, costumes and set design of ‘Lost in Space’ were all approved by someone who thought that 1997’s ‘The Fifth Element’ and Fincher’s ‘Alien 3’ were the future of big-budget science fiction. They weren’t, of course. Most people don’t go see sci fi action pictures looking for over-designed expressionist takes on what some art school grad believes the future might really look like, and from the opening scenes, where Major Don West pilots a transparent pokemon ball with a swiveling can-opener attached to its ass through space, uttering lines like ‘Last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer’ or the brilliant ‘It’s showtime’, we know that there is no unity to the film. Later the pilot’s chair of the Jupiter 2 has what looks to be a petrified cobra stapled to the back in lieu of a headrest. It’s clear that the art directors thought it was 2006 and they were making the last reel of ‘The Fountain’ while the writers thought it was 1986 and they were writing Duke Nukem. By the time the single title credit flashes across the screen in an over-processed blur of what writing might look line 70 years from now, we know that no good can come of this.
We can talk about the family dynamic next. The writers were straightjacketed by the original series so needed two parents, one hunky major, a saucy 20 year old daughter, a sulky middle child with all the appeal of a dark-haired Jane Brady, and a genius tween. They shook things up for the 90’s by having Major West be a seething pile of testoerone. Seriously, LeBlanc’s West makes so many passes at Heather Graham’s Judy that he makes Austin Powers seem like a shirking violet. This gets incredibly creepy when you factor in that Dr. Robinson - Judy’s dad- chose West for the mission personally. It’s like he wants to repopulate space using his daughter as a kind of space-cattle. The creepiness escalates when you realize that his younger daughter, Penny, is going to be Lacy Chabert in a few years. Heather Graham supposed to be the sexy one of the crew but where she’s running around in loose jumpsuits most of the time, precocious Penny wears half-shirts that show off her abs.
Then there are the cryo suits the Robinsons wear. Good lord. Designed by someone who thought the rubber nipple suits in Batman Forever left too much to the imagination, the breasts on Heather Graham’s suit come to a point that could probably etch glass. The others also over-accentuate the chest area, especially on the men, and when Dr. Robison goes on about hyperspace with his head floating improbably over a sculpted rubber gladiator’s body, we see why William Hurt was never tapped to play Batman. It’s little Will Robinson suffers the worst. The suits are obviously bulky and hard to move in and he’s shown in slow motion trying to run several times. It’s kind of like watching the midget who plays Chucky run in costume but with the Chucky head removed.
The other weird sexual tension flows between Dr. Smith and young Will, although Oldham does seem to be trying to make their relationship a father-son thing. The problem is he’s imitating Jonathan Harris’s exceedingly campy performance, which poisons everything he tries to do. Oldham’s able to tone it down to about a highly-caffinated Paul Lynn, but since this Will is about ten years old, the creepiness stays about the same as the original, but when you add a lot of tight leather and rubber, and we’re back at nearly intolerable levels.
Time to talk about the plot. Neither original nor entirely terrible, the story seems about right for some nostalgia-laced popcorn fluff, but certain instances of glaring strangeness doom the picture far more certainly that the robot’s attempts to destroy the Jupiter 2.
For example: when the castaways discover and board a derelict spaceship in a scene taken shot-for-shot from ‘The Black Hole’, instead of Maximilian Schell they discover the leech/howler monkey mentioned earlier. It’s the first alien ever encountered by human beings, and the Robinson’s instantly adopt it and let their teenage daughter care for it. Now, anyone who as ever seen a sci fi picture before knows that the little beast might be radioactive, spit poison, lay eggs in the flesh of mammals, be capable of cross-breeding with humans, or it could even be an immature form of a super-intelligent spacefaring race, but none of this occurs to anyone. Seriously, Leela had more reservations about Nibbler than these so-called scientists do about the freakish monster they instantly give the run of their flying home. It wasn’t until I checked in IMDB that I realized that in the series, Penny had a pet space-monkey, so this was a little fan-service, and needed no more explanation than that.
I’m running long, and obviously thinking far more about the movie than the people who made it, so I’d better wrap it up. I guess I can’t mention the porky-pig fireworks torpedo or the spiders that can live in deep space yet somehow carefully maintain an atmosphere on the ship they are eating. Or any of the things I actually liked, like how small the script was, which is best for a film that’s supposed to be about a family, but maybe not so good for one that’s about space battles. Or how Penny keeps a vlog, which was remarkably prescient for a film this lame. I guess I can’t talk about the robot at all, which might be for the best.
In all, Lost in Space is like a Lego toy constructed by several ADD children using various parts of several different yet incomplete sets- as if one kid had half of the millennium falcon, another had one of those castle sets, the third had a smattering of blocks from several Lego dinosaurs, another had K-nex, another had Lincoln logs… you get the idea. They all worked separately for a few hours before bringing what they had made to the guy who directed ‘The Ghost and the Darkness’ to try and make something sensible out of. The result is this film.
There was a three-picture deal, btw. I dearly wish the two sequels had been made. Imagining 3 years between pictures, Lost and Space 3 would have hit around 2004. It would be worth the millions the films would have cost just to see Matt LeBlanc’s super-horny Major West dealt with sharing a spaceship with Heather Graham and by then 22-year-old Lacey Chabert (who, in 2004, was playing a 16-year-old in Mean Girls). Then we could have gotten the big-screen, sci-fi remake of Three’s Company out of the way at the same time.
The Deconstructionist with Gordon Weir knows far too much about Lacey Chabert, and appears every Wednesday.