Remembering 1998's Lost in Space

The 1998 film adaptation of Lost in Space would seem very much of its time--a feature film based on a '60s-era TV show amid the late '90s space opera boom, which even had a member of the cast of Friends trying to extend their acting career beyond their familiar on-screen persona (Matt LeBlanc an action hero!). Still, it was not very warmly received at the time by critics, while the box office gross, if not low by contemporary standards ($136 million in early 1998 dollars), was still not quite enough to justify the big budget quite evident on the screen. Opinion toward the film does not seem to have grown warmer with time (the critics' and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are 27 and 24 percent, respectively), while a still more recent Lost in Space remake (a 2018-2021 Netflix series) has probably helped further bury the movie.

Still, even if I have not seen it in a long time I vaguely recall the film having its moments, with some bits cropping up in memory again and again. The premise of the film, as it happened, was that old sci-fi standard--the attempt to save humanity following ecological catastrophe on Earth by finding it another planetary home. Assigned to the mission Major Don West (the LeBlanc character) is initially cynical, thinking it mere corporate public relations--because "every school child" knew that "recycling technology" was going to save the Earth.

Professor John Robinson tells West that every school child had been lied to.

So does it seem when we look back on the earnestness with which people spoke once of recycling--and what we hear of it now as the ecological crisis just goes on getting worse.