Lost in Space 

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Director: Stephen Hopkins
Cast: William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham

Recently the mock humor online magazine The Onion did a hilarious piece on how the Center for Nostalgia reported that we were "running out of past." Chalk up another example, as moviegoers across America are held captive to the collective memories of Baby Boomers yet again as "Lost in Space" careens into the multiplex. It probably hurt that I never saw the original series (I'm too young, thanks), but this was one movie that barely made sense at any level.

William Hurt is the professor father who ignores his kids as he tries to save the world; his Robinson family is picked to colonize Alpha Prime, a doppleganger for Earth that will provide the future with water and food for all. Unfortunately for them, a cadre of seditious rebels want to thwart the project and take Alpha Prime for itself. So when Heather Graham, Mimi Rogers, Matt LeBlanc and Lacey Chabert get jettisoned into deep space, leave it to thug-for-hire Gary Oldman to ruin everything. Lots of weird space-time continuum problems ensue, along with idiotic treatises on the heart vs. the head and fatherhood and love and blah blah blah. Hurt and Oldman are especially pained to be in this thing; you can almost sense their desire to wrap up the shoot so they can make it to the bank before closing time.

Really, doesn't anybody bother reading the final script these days? I could have had my yellow Labrador retriever Kije go through the screenplay to pick up all the mistakes, plot holes and blatant deus ex machinas—and he would have done a better job. The script seems so haphazard, so unfinished. The ethos of time travel is horribly wasted, the "problem marriage" between the two Robinson parents so ignored, the "sexual tension" between LeBlanc and Graham so lobotomized, the children all retreating to the usual precocious world-weary sarcasm that only serves to express how bereft of ideas the screenwriter was at four in the morning last January.

I'm all for camp, all for kitsch. I appreciate a good old space groaner as much as the next red-blooded American. But when is anyone going to bother making a good movie? Do we get "Star Wars" and "Aliens" and that's it? With this much money involved, it seems that the moviemakers could do a lot more than insult our intelligences and make us pay $6 for the privilege.

—Ian Williams

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