I got "Lost in Space" as part of a 3 for a dollar DVD deal, so I went into the movie with little investment sunk into it. I mean, it was practically free, wasn't it? Not so, for as I watched my movie, I felt much like HAL9000 must have felt when Dave started to pull the memory circuits from his processor. "I feel my mind going" kept running through my rapidly constricting soul while watching this movie.

First of all, we see a lot of things happening, and there was probably some reasoning behind what was going on, but I kept getting that "What the fuck is happening?" feeling all throughout the movie. The movie deals with a family who gets err ... lost ... in space. I think that that pretty much sums it up. Don't ask how they got lost or what the heck they were doing in the first place. I think it has something to do with the Earth becoming inhospitable to human life sometime soon, but you shouldn't worry about those petty things when the time travel stuff comes into play. What's that other ship supposed to be? What's going on with that time paradox? Umm, isn't that character dead? I don't think it really matters in the end, when a planet suddenly, and for no apparent reason not only goes nova (it must have become a sun in an alternate timeline) but actually forms a black hole. I'm not quite sure what was going on in the last half hour, and neither will you, but don't worry, it's got neat visuals and a chameleon monkey.

Enough about the convoluted and possibly existing plot, on to the players. First off, we have Matt LeBlanc from Friends playing a military fly boy. Funny, I think he forgot to switch characters from the "bad actor" character he plays on the TV show. On to the luscious girl who played Rollergirl in Boogie Nights. I won't even bother looking up her name. It doesn't matter. Suffice it to say that no, she doesn't get naked in this movie, so go rent Boogie Nights again and curl up on the couch. Other than that, there is an annoying kid, Will Robinson. Imagine Wesley Crusher but younger, smarter, more annoying, more naïve, and saves everyone's ass about 7 times throughout the movie. Rounding out the family is a bad father, a generic mother, and a helium powered girl. Then there's the robot, who spends half of the movie shouting things like "DESTROY ROBINSON FAMILY!" I hear ya, robot. The other half he spends ... well, I really can't say, I think that part falls under plot. Something about getting destroyed and reborn with the personality of Will Robinson ... I really don't know. Finally, we come to the true shining star of the picture, the always fabulous and incredibly talented Gary Oldman as Dr. Smith, the supposed bad guy of the flic. Now, Smith is a character you're supposed to hate to love and love to hate, so to speak, but I just found myself enthralled with Oldman, just waiting for him to do away with the entire Robinson clan. Well, sadly, suffice it to say that he doesn't and is given much too little screen time. The movie would have been so much better had it just featured Dr. Smith killing everyone and then delivering a two hour long monologue of quotes like "You bickering bucket of blasted bolts" and suchlike. Anything would have been more entertaining than the dreck that New Line Cinema tried to shove down our throats, sugar-coated with beautiful special effects.

The only other redeeming quality I can think of is the music, since I turned to it often to find entertainment that the rest of the movie was just not delivering.

You know a movie is bad when the entire audience starts shouting out "No! NOOO!" for the last twenty minutes of the movie. Of course it was hard to make out what was going on in the movie underneath all that shouting. But who really cares? See "Lost In Space" and I guarantee that you won't. In short, Lost In Space breeds the kind of hatred for a civilization that could realize such a project that one only finds in such charming things as cancer or nazism. I believe it was Montesquieu who said that one should begin each day by swallowing whole a live toad, to be assured that he would not run into anything more unpleasant over the course of the day. After seeing "Lost In Space" I must say that Montesquieu has met his match. I give it a yak for Gary Oldman.