Friends star Matt LeBlanc started and ended his career as a leading man in big budget summer blockbusters with this overblown family-oriented sci-fi from director Stephen Hopkins, whose 'almost Hollywood major-league' status also took a severe battering. Working from a charmless script, Hopkins delivers a loud, chaotic mess of a movie that no amount of expensive special effects can hope to save.
LeBlanc plays war hero Major Don West, who is given the job of setting the Jupiter 2 spacecraft on its course to Alpha Prime, where the other crew members, the Robinson family, are to prepare the planet for colonisation. Having successfully piloted the craft into space, West joins the Robinsons in cryogenic sleep, unaware that terrorist and unwilling stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman) has programmed the ship's robot to sabotage the mission.
As well as LeBlanc's less than stellar performance, and a horribly hammy turn from Oldman, we get a pre-sexy Lacy Chabert as shrill teenager Penny Robinson, a post-sexy Mimi Rogers as the mother, mid-sexy Heather Graham as older daughter Judy, Jack Johnson as irritating child genius Will Robinson, and a miscast William Hurt as leader of the family, Professor John Robinson. Even with two future Oscar winners on board (Hurt and Oldman) this adventure for the passengers of the Jupiter 2 is destined to crash and burn, the muddled script resorting to hackneyed sci-fi claptrap such as time travel to try and dig itself out of a (black) hole.
Perhaps the worst thing about the whole sorry affair are the lame CGI creatures: cute alien Blawp, blatantly designed to sell Lost In Space merchandising to the kids; crappy, supposedly scary space spiders that attack our heroes; and a mutant arachnoid Gary Oldman that looked really bad even when the film was first released, and which looks positively awful by today's standards.
The best thing about the film is its theme music by Apollo 440: not only is it a great track, but it heralds the closing credits and an end to this farrago.
3/10.
LeBlanc plays war hero Major Don West, who is given the job of setting the Jupiter 2 spacecraft on its course to Alpha Prime, where the other crew members, the Robinson family, are to prepare the planet for colonisation. Having successfully piloted the craft into space, West joins the Robinsons in cryogenic sleep, unaware that terrorist and unwilling stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman) has programmed the ship's robot to sabotage the mission.
As well as LeBlanc's less than stellar performance, and a horribly hammy turn from Oldman, we get a pre-sexy Lacy Chabert as shrill teenager Penny Robinson, a post-sexy Mimi Rogers as the mother, mid-sexy Heather Graham as older daughter Judy, Jack Johnson as irritating child genius Will Robinson, and a miscast William Hurt as leader of the family, Professor John Robinson. Even with two future Oscar winners on board (Hurt and Oldman) this adventure for the passengers of the Jupiter 2 is destined to crash and burn, the muddled script resorting to hackneyed sci-fi claptrap such as time travel to try and dig itself out of a (black) hole.
Perhaps the worst thing about the whole sorry affair are the lame CGI creatures: cute alien Blawp, blatantly designed to sell Lost In Space merchandising to the kids; crappy, supposedly scary space spiders that attack our heroes; and a mutant arachnoid Gary Oldman that looked really bad even when the film was first released, and which looks positively awful by today's standards.
The best thing about the film is its theme music by Apollo 440: not only is it a great track, but it heralds the closing credits and an end to this farrago.
3/10.