I tried to watch "Lost in Space" with
my daughter, but didn't make it even halfway through before I had
to turn it off. Daughter didn't protest, really. What a piece of
crap. Are there any up and coming directors who actually know how
to direct action so that the audience doesn't become completely
disoriented?
I'd re-title it: "Lost in the
Screen-Space."
Whatever bad things people have to say about
guys like Tarantino, at least he knows how to place the camera
and plan his shots in such a way that the audience has a clue as
to what's happening. Do studio execs have a clue as to why it's a
bad idea to mindlessly hire commercials directors? (I don't know
if the director of Lost in Space was a commercials director, but
he certainly showed all the bad habits of one, just like that
moron who directed The Rock.)
And what a putrid script! It was so bad it
bordered on camp (which would have been better than what it was).
William Hurt has indeed hit rock bottom by giving the nod to
doing this one. Gary Oldman did not could not save it, not by a
long shot.
The girl who played Penny was interesting. I
think she has potential.
This was an example of why high-tech films will
always be bad when constructed from the "top" down,
that is, starting with all of the various effects, explosions,
gadgets, hardware updates, etc., that the studio hopes to see in
the movie to tantalize the audience, and then building a story
around all the anticipated wizardry. (Several of the effects,
btw, were unintentionally campy-looking.)
The film would have been a lot more fun if,
instead of taking the Star Trek lead and ultra-modernizing the
whole look of the show, they had begun with the assumption that
the look of the film would be almost identical to that of the old
TV series; without any computer effects to rely upon, the
challenge to write a good script would have been all the greater.
