The Worst Idea Of All Time - Review: Lost In Space (1998)

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

The Decider's Club has ruled, and the boiz have obeyed. It's time to check out the Matt Le Blanc-led Lost in Space big screen adaption, starring a sex-pest and co-starring a weird CGI monkey! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today... You ready? Okay, let's go. The hunt for the wildest movie of the summer... Everybody run! Ends here. This is your super friendly and not aggressive reminder to buy tickets immediately. Borderlands, now playing.

T minus one minute and counting. she's all yours mission control this is jupiter one the robinsons are all tucked in we are ready to fly the time has come hello and welcome to the Patreon Zone. Hey, we should call it that from now on, eh? Yeah, it's difficult to argue with such an immediately on-the-nose and creative name, Tim. I couldn't agree more. Guy and I are communicating through what might be the single laggiest connection we've ever had So enjoy the choppiness

It seems like a great metaphor for the film we just watched Which was painful, stupid And you just wonder how they didn't do a better job of it Similar to Skype's current handling of our communications well in skype's defense we're actually using zuckerberg's messenger uh application or i am for comms but i agree tim it's a disaster as was the 1998 american sci-fi adventure film uh lost in space lost in space Lost in Space. Lost in Space. Weighed in at two hours. I think it had an eight-minute credit sequence.

God knows what was happening during that. I could not wait to shut the thing down. But, I mean, also, you know, try and enjoy. Yeah, not just enjoy the lag. I say to you, Tim, let's try and enjoy the lag. This could be a new frontier for the ways in which we record and communicate with one another. We'll have to be patient listeners. We could try the telegram style of saying stop at the end of every sentence.

Stop. I really like that. Stop. Well, let's go. I can't imagine it's going to work well in comedy riffs, but we'll give it a go, eh? Stop. Sounds like a good plan to me.

So this was a film brought to us by Akiva Goldsmith, the pen of that genius, who may ring a bell, that name, for you. Sure did for me. It was his great mind that also brought us another patreon zone experience known as batman and robin stop yeah his uh what i quite liked as quickly as an insert uh is the sort of tit for tat nature that our communication will take as we pretty much go sentence for sentence in building this thing from the ground up. Closed sidebar.

He's got a heck of a filmography in various roles as writer, writer-producer, occasionally director I see here, but not only did he give us Batman and Robin, it says here he also wrote Cinderella Man. Did he win an Oscar for that? Stop. I couldn't tell you.

I'm not quite sure what Cinderella Man is. However, I did see on his IMDb briefly before my computer crashed that he was also responsible for, I think, writing A Beautiful Mind of all movies. That was lauded. Stop. Yeah. Both critically lauded movies beautiful mind maybe that could be akiva goldsman himself a semi-autobiographical tale of a man who has a

yearning and a burning to create content specifically film scripts and no gauge or sort of uh critical control or idea of whether or not what he's creating is any good or not. Because what we just watched was miles away from prestige. I mean, I feel like I would have called it a starring vehicle for Matt LeBlanc, who was at the peak of his fame during Friends at the time it was filmed. But the surrounding cast are also remarkably famous. I mean, I guess this was just going to be a large-scale space film but the thing is it's hard to tell if it's meant to be a it's it straddles the line so carefully between comedy and action film or sci-fi action film that it kind of lands

in neither area it's it's it's not serious or silly it's just sort of it's absent of uh an identity stop which is in a lot of ways my least favorite genre because i love a good sci-fi but boy when you sort of grab little bits of sci-fi but you know ignore the rules it's like fuck you man plus this movie had a robot in it and it's in a lead role which you would have thought for me would be two thumbs up instantly however they still fucked that up because it was like one of those bullshit versions of a poorly written puppet robot so really my theory just built and built uh with the film from the outset but as you mentioned guy a cavalcade of uh starring men and women from um i mean from huge franchises of the day party of fives claudia uh takes a central role

in this film as well heather graham is in here um i think your name uh penny is lacy something do you know her name stop lacy chabot yes i you know her name? Stop. Lacey Chabot. Yes, I do know her name. She was also in Mean Girls and most famously to me, the voice of Eliza Thornberry in The Wild Thornberries. To pick up the mantle

of listing famous people involved in the vehicle, William Hurt, who I'm not entirely sure what he's famous from, but I know for sure that guy's famous. And then obviously Matt Leblanc gary oldman

plays the villain quite a young and foxy gary oldman to his credit uh and i'm also surprised if i'm not surprised but like this is based on a 1960s uh american television show which i'd actually quite like to check out because i feel like that would have a real good sense of campy fun which is something this is sorely lacking. Stop. It's interesting that you've never seen it. I've actually watched a bit of the original 1960s show. It ran as reruns when I was a kid because New Zealand was approximately, sort of anywhere between three and seven decades

behind getting American culture and distributing it amongst our sheep wranglers. And so I would catch a whiff of that 1960s show, which was just bustling onto our screens. And more recently, I actually consumed the entirety of the Netflix reboot because I was just in the mood for something a little bit frivolous. And I ended up sort of sitting down and watching the whole thing over the course of about a week. And it was sort of sitting down and watching the whole thing over the course of about a week and it was it was sort of fine um but to get back to this movie i mean i'll say two things before i hand back to you guy the first gary oldman can do no wrong even in this poorly written role he shines he shines

above the script and this very very poor movie the second thing i'll mention is this film didn't come out that long ago 20 years 1998 holy shit our hero is a complete sex pest stop yeah uh matt leblanc is sort of playing a charmless version of joey almost uh like an extension of his character the doctor he plays in Days of Our Lives, I can't remember his name, while he's actually on Friends. But yeah, all he does, like aside from being, I think a semi-competent pilot,

is hit on Heather Graham, who in a sort of sharp twist and certainly played up for laughs in the script here, is revealed to be the daughter of the two head professors on the mission uh professor john robinson and professor maureen robinson and at that reveal i could not help but dig into uh the respective ages of heather graham and the woman playing her mother mimi rogers uh and for this film to hold true, Mimi Rogers' character, Professor Maureen Robinson, would have had to be pregnant with their eldest daughter, Heather Graham, at the ripe old age of 14.

Oh my God. That's no good. Stop. And this is the... Yeah, thank you, Guy. I was waiting on that. The thing about Heather Graham is that she consistently looks sort of about 10 years younger than she is at all times.

But even so, it was weird that you bring this up because it was a thought that occurred to me while I was watching this. I was like, man, this whole Hollywood machine, eh? You had to trap women in formaldehyde when they turned 17 and three quarters years old. You know, inject bull semen into their face as i'm led to believe the medical procedure is but the dudes they just get sort of older and apparently that's fine tell you what nothing changes in the year 2056 which i believe is when this is set

and uh on that note as well there's a very confusing reference to Looney Tunes, which feels out of date now. Like, I know that this was coming out for a 1998 audience, but come on, guys, commit to the conceit here. We're in 2056. No one knows what the fuck you're talking about with your Bugs Bunny and your Porky Pig. Stop. Yeah.

I mean, I love Looney Tunes, so I'm not going to begrudge any film, especially one as frustrating as this, any opportunity to give me a glimpse into a different, perhaps more playful world. And another quick aside, Heather Graham and Mimi Rogers would go on to, well, not quite co-star,

but they were part of the same film franchise around the same time that this was made, Tim, in the late 90s. It was a comedy film franchise and it had three films. And I just wonder if you can guess what that was. Austin Powers. Yes. Do you remember me more mimi rogers as uh miss miss or mrs kensington

mrs kensington yeah absolutely she's a um oh god sorry my whole microphone set up just bloody toppled toppled over on top of me and it's rather heavy um i've got a little jerry rigged up system as i'm sure you can imagine um yeah fuck yeah i remember that i think i've uh said this in a previous podcast but austin powers was the first ever film one of the only ones that i've learned like i learned the whole kind of script verbatim when i was a child i saw it so many times i can respect that uh just to say we should reinstate the stop method as i think it was working quite well for us uh fuck fuck the stop method the safety net's gone now mate we're taking it away oh my god a couple of lads on the loose well yeah i mean where were you sort of you you

shared a powerful diatribe against the hollywood star system specifically as it pertains to women and i couldn't agree more you also said gary oldman can do no wrong certainly on screen as Marvel diatribe against the Hollywood star system, specifically as it pertains to women. And I couldn't agree more. You also said Gary Oldman can do no wrong. Certainly on screen as Dr. Zachary Smith. And I was, because it took me a while to identify him as Gary Oldman. He is, he looks young here. Maybe he aged late.

The man's a chameleon guy. That's what you've got to understand about him. And he's played a lot of sort of older statesmanly men. But, you know, this movie did come out 20 years ago as well. Have you seen Matt LeBlanc recently? He doesn't look like this anymore. No, he's got all silver hair and he hosts Top Gear in the UK. I was just going to say Gary Oldman can do roles. He bailed.

Did he? Yeah. He announced that he's off. Oh, shit. can do wrong did he yeah he announced that he's off oh shit i mean why the fuck would you do anything if you were on friends for 10 years just take the next i don't know 40 50 years off i don't see this totally i don't know why everyone feels a pressure to stay famous i guess it's like a drug but like if if i don't know you know star in shitters? You never know it's going to be a shitter, but I wouldn't do it. I think Top Gear's a pretty roundly respected show guy. I don't think most people call it a shitter.

I'm not talking about Top Gear specifically. I'm just talking about if you look at the body of work that the actors from Friends have put out since the sitcom finished, I think only maybe Lisa Kudrow is coming out uh covered in glory i think people like to work you know and you can't always get a dream project every time you got to take your chances you never know what the next titanic is going to be imagine if titanic was a flop they just put all that time and money into it and then it came out and everyone was like this sucks.

I can immediately imagine... We knew the ending from the outset. The title of one of the film reviews or certainly an article rounding up its abysmal failure at the box office and its critically panned reception. It would read as follows, a Titanic flop. Great stuff.

You really should be getting into the professional realm of reviewing films at this point, I think, Guy. Did you see that coming, Tim? Yeah, I did a little. Oh, well, actually, I was interested to see where you went with that because you're a creative guy, and I was like, oh, what's it going to be? How's he going to fit Iceberg into the title?

No, no, he's going to go for the first thought and just commit to that. Good stuff. That's what i like about you you're brave um so back to 1998's lost in space uh i have a confession to make i have seen this film before when i was a youngin and uh off the strength of seeing it on the big screen i actually owned the original motion picture soundtrack featuring uh an original theme by apollo 440 which you treated to as the first track on the end credits and a really great and oft forgotten fat boy slim song uh which is called from memory everybody needs a 303 bloody good stuff a good album uh propellerheads is also on there which which is a late 90s, early 2000s electronic rock duo

who have been lost to the sands of time. Most famously created the opening theme song with Dame Shirley Bassey for the Graham Norton show. It's all good. It's a good album, Guy. Yeah, it's all good intel. I mean, you are someone who can always separate the music from the movie. You listen to scores. So I wonder then if you enjoyed the film or just you identify with whatever the as being uh because you know whatever the age when you when this was

like 10 probably or for you guys maybe 11 or 12 it's the first time you're really developing critical faculty and so not everything is pleasing anymore and some films uh start to sort of rear their ugly head as being bad or maybe not enjoyable and he said this one stood out to him as a a sort of a turning of the worm with regards to recognizing something that's not good and that was uh as i sort of pedaled my bike back over the williamsburg bridge you know in a real huff to try and make the screening time uh on time having that thought thought bouncing around in my head did not bode well for the following two hours,

and rightly so. I'll bet. So we probably should have done this at the start. My context for heading into this was I thought we were kicking off the watch at 9am, which is gentlemen's hours, and I was rudely awoken by my cell phone beeping at five minutes to eight,

saying sort of impending watch or words to that effect. And it was all systems go. And I quickly messaged you and I said, are we doing this now? And then didn't hear any reply for 10 minutes, but I kicked off the movie anyway. And then you said, yes, we're in it. So this is once again been a dawn service for Timbo. The first stimuli that i experience in my waking hours of the day and it's a rude awakening that's for sure we should probably get into what's

wrong with this film i love that um you you thought to yourself that it was at nine o'clock but previous you had correctly registered the time and planned accordingly with uh he knows his limitations but they are you know they are many and voluminous oh fuck you don't get a lot of that was a tautology they are voluminous and heavy um well either way a pleasure to see you uh take the covers off voluminous and fucking take it for a spin around the block because it's a heck of a word. What is wrong with this film is a fantastic question and one well posed by my colleague, Tim Batt. Namely, it is sort of the first two characters you see,

I don't know who the guy who's flying with Matt LeBlanc's character is, but he insists, I couldn't tell if they were goodies or baddies because he insisted on speaking in a voice which sort of was like, okay, we're going to shoot these guns now. And I was like, are you, what is this decision and how is everyone on set okay

with you committing to it? And he dropped out of it once briefly, I think, which let you, which is the worst possible thing because then you know it's not his real voice because i gave him the benefit of the doubt eventually because he committed so hard to this goofy voice he was putting on i was like okay i guess he's got a strange speaking voice but it's a bit of a character trait and then he sort of drops back into a more neutral tone you're like oh come on guys what the fuck what are we all doing

here what are we all doing here we hired so many people to put this thing together what's the up to can we get a director in here to tell them to just chill the fuck out absolutely because the other thing you you risk and what they did is uh confusing the heck out of the punters uh so and then it just gets you it gets you off on a you know it's like uh no i don't, I don't know if that's true, but it's like meeting someone for the first time and they do a weird handshake or something or they do a joke that doesn't quite fly. And you're like, oh, did you have to start like that?

Because now I'm going to be on edge around you for the next two hours. And then from there, it sort of just immediately launches into the, oh, I tell you, there was a fun little visual trick at the start of the movie and it got a few laughs from Monty which is when the Mimi Rogers character Maureen is on the phone to like

hey can I make a recommendation henceforth the characters are Claudia, Mrs Kensington and Joey and Commissioner Gordon because that's Gary Oldman who is Dr Smith I'll do my best, so Claudia's on the phone

to someone who we don't know well enough to have an alternative sitcom actually maybe one of the stars of the original TV show because there were cameos abound apparently but I don't recognise anyone, oh I don't recognise anyone. Oh, I didn't know that. And she's on like some sort of holographic call

and her son, who's very intelligent and loves goofing around with technologies, hiding behind some sort of slatted door in a cupboard and he's changing the body that's rendered beneath the hologram head. And so while she's on a phone call to sort of a work superior, presumably, you know, she's presented as a muscle-bound soldier carrying a big machete, a sexy lady, you know, with a sort of cartoonishly sexy body in a bikini.

And then a Donkey Kong-style ape also wearing the same bikini. And that was the topper that really pushed me over the edge and elicited one of the few audible laughs or noises as I watched this film. It was a good visual gag. Did you not pay any attention to the conversation that was happening in there? That was Will's teacher.

Ah, I did not. I was so taken aside by the visual gag. She was upset because she was ringing maureen and i would be i'll bet dollars to donuts that that is the original maureen robinson from the 1960s show uh who i assume i need to say rip now referencing it anyway um she was either the teacher or the headmistress of the school explaining that will have been redirecting the entire entire power grid from the school's electrical system uh to his experiments because he's trying to build a time machine and i love how everyone brushes off will trying to make a time machine it's acknowledged that he's a very smart boy

he makes a lot of things makes a lot of gadgets everyone sort of respects his intellect but as soon as he starts talking about time travel and how he's sort of semi-attempting it everyone kind of just ah well you don't know what you're going on about it's like maybe we should hear him out for you know two sentences about his time travel machine well this seems big that's right and for anyone brave enough to stick around for the full two hours or I guess hour and 30 45 minute mark you would see why

because huge payoff god darn it the kid figures out also quick correction and shout out to June Lockhart who played the original Maureen

still kicking around at 92 god bless love that you gotta love that also she played the mother role on Lassie Which is a good bit of fun I guess that's the cameo

Lassie Everyone was like Oh it's the mum from Lassie Talking to the mum of the reboot of Lost in Space What a time to be alive Yeah That would have really sent shockwaves through the cinema This was a different time.

No Patriot Act. Everyone was just going hell for leather out there. Yeah, it was certainly a simpler time. I guess the internet didn't present as much information to us, so a lot more people could live in that ignorance is bliss state. Totally. As advertised by an old proverb. So after that phone call anyway we discovered the

ozone layer has gone to shit within 20 years earth will be uninhabitable this leaves the family the swiss family robinson although they are played by americans uh to travel to outer space uh to colonize some sort of planet which will eventually be inhabitable is the presumption. Of course, Lacey Chabot or Eliza Thornberry, as we will call her, is frustrated as a young... It casts a young teenage woman in the late 90s. She's horned up in the extreme. She is horned up in the extreme.

And they do a fantastic job of communicating that to the audience by taking a hammer and smashing us over the head with it. Do you know what I respected, though? The fact that Eliza Thornberry's approach to documenting herself, really, there's a real template for vlogging. What she's doing there there the whole selfie cam approach this is genuinely ahead of its time i nailed it i thought that too i i really did uh and i i found it immensely satisfying that was actually that paired because you did that happens very soon

after the visual gags so yeah uh obviously i'm off balance at the start with the voice and then there were two beats where I was like, okay, here we go. And after that, I sort of thought, well, we could, you know, this could be okay. Yeah. And so it's pretty much just the family and the essential spare part to go on this mission

to colonize a new planet. Funnily enough, also, what's the word? Presciently, they're called the Space Force. Oh, true. Good point. That is prescient. We won't get into that. It's too topical.

We don't like to hit the real topical stuff. It dates the podcast. But yes, Space Force, that is, once again, ahead of its time. The whole setup, the backdrop for this entire... I like the idea that we don't want to Date the podcast Because this particular recording Will go under

This is on a gold record one day This will be filed under very important In the history of humanity Sorry to interrupt your thought as you were Not at all Fuck what was I saying It wasn't important I can't remember That's why I'm sorry to interrupt the thought Not at all. Fuck, what was I saying? Oh, it wasn't important. I can't remember.

That's why I'm sorry to interrupt the thought. Oh, yeah. Today. You ready? Okay, let's go. The hunt for the wildest movie of the summer. Everybody run! Ends here.

This is your super friendly and not aggressive reminder to buy tickets immediately borderlands now playing sorry the backdrop for this whole thing is that so earth's environment is shitting itself 40% of ozone remains there's only 20 years of habitable life left on the planet and there's two sects so there's one sort of organized sort of approved good guys which is the space force and then there is a sect of terrorists who um fuck what were they called the sedition i think they're just called the sedition and they're only referenced at the start but they are trying to get to alpha prime which is the habitable planet which is you know light years away um before the robinsons to kind of take it over for their own whims but i kind of was into this idea of a dystopian future

where the this terrorist organization was like just as scientifically advanced and kitted up as a fully serviced like government approved un backed global project yeah that is just this like ragtag bunch of cowboys so we're like yeah we'll fucking race you i love that i i i i agree as well i mean from from what i gleaned we aren't given a lot uh in in the way by the way of ideology for this uh the sed this edition, as you correctly guessed. Meaning that, I mean, for all we know, they could be the good guys. That is so true.

And the family, and this brings me back to what's wrong with the film, I think. This family is so deeply unlikable. Eliza Thornberry is probably the character I gravitated towards the most. But I've got to tell you, child casting, it's a hard thing thing They really fucked it up with Will though That kid is so deeply unlikable

Holy shit, there is not a redeeming moment of him on stage It is painful to watch Holy heck I would hate to be on the receiving end of those verbal blows I did not warm to that boy. No. Well, if you've got a problem with him, why don't you say it to his face?

Jack Johnson, now 31 years old. He went to... Jack Johnson? Really? Yeah. Fuck. He was born in L.A. It's hard to trace him down now.

I'd love to see what he looks like as an adult. Different Jack Johnson, obviously. I mean, I didn't hate him with the same fire of a thousand suns as you did but i mean i agree that generally speaking the characters would would they were all so stale and like there was no everyone was uh sort of cast into a prototype or like you know a first draft of each character uh and so but without any there wasn't any any warmth or maybe the floors weren't there visible enough or something i don't know what it was matt leblanc is just a sex pest that's kind of his whole shtick he's a sex pest who can as you say kind of fly

good but he's put in charge of a ship which by by his own admission, essentially flies itself. So it's a non-important quality, except for a couple of key moments in the film, of course. The dad, John, kind of the flattest character of them all. It's just like, hey, I'm a science guy and I sort of ignore my family too much. But you're supposed to like me heaps. It's like, well, why? Why do I? Why would I like you, dude? You don't give me anything on screen nothing give me

a reason save a cat you know and then they do save a cat and then like that is the worst cgi cat i've ever seen i wish you hadn't had saved it yeah in 20 years it would also be fair to say how far have we come in terms of uh cgi some of the some of the i mean, so a bit of a spoiler alert here. We haven't really recounted the plot for you, but Gary Oldman's character, who's... No, I think we have. You get it. You guys get it.

He's the leader of the terrorist sect. No, he's not. He's a mercenary. He's a gun for hire. He gets paid by them to try and sabotage the mission for the Robinsons, but then he gets double-crossed by the sedition who have planted a device in his communicator which electrocutes him, and then he sort of goes into a comatose state

and ends up aboard the ship while it takes off with the Robinsons on board, trapped in cryogenic freezing chambers, and a robot which he has now reprogrammed to destroy the family and the ship in 16 hours stakes laid oh wow i i was really on another to be completely honest to or not to be completely honest with you but uh when the when the i arrived home to start watching the the film there was. There has been since I moved into my new place, which I love here in Brooklyn, New York City. One corner of my room was sort of,

the wooden flooring was rotten. I think it had been beneath some sort of leak in a previous life. And so I told the super, which is what we call the superintendent, who's sort of like a body corp. No, not a body corp, but he's in charge of making sure everything goes okay. So he sent around some guys to do some work

and they were really fucking going for it at that point. On the tools, it would be fair to say. So you're in there watching one of the worst films of the late 90s and they're repairing your floor at the same time. Yeah, and it was an uncomfortable feeling because I didn't provide any context. They didn't speak a lick of English and I don't speak a lick of Spanish,

which meant that pretty much while they were sort of practically going about fixing a problem in my life, I was actively watching just an absolute abomination. Look, you're both at work, mate. It's just as simple as that. I know, but it just doesn't look like it. So the thing is, though, so he, near the end of the film, he gets bitten by a plot device borrowed from the good people at Spider-Man.

He gets bitten by a radioactive spider of some description and winds up sort of in this weird blend of like Darth Maul and Doctor Octopus and Venom, perhaps. And he wears this cloak. That's skinny. Yeah, yeah. But you don't see it because originally you just see his face high up above where his body was.

Yeah. And when they sort of drop the cloak and you get to see the whole operation that they've been saving, this, you know, the big CGI reveal you'd imagine in 1998, that was also one of the laughs for me. I mean, I loved it. I thought it was so funny. Yeah.

I thought it was horrifying. And I was like, because that was the point where I got into that bit of the film. It's about the three quarter mark. It's sort of the start of the third act. I don't know if that's true. And I was like, okay, I get it. This film isn't for me. It's a family movie.

It's for the kids. And that depiction of him as the skeletal eight foot spider villain is truly horrifying. Like I'd be traumatized if I saw that when I was real young. And then I was like, cool. I now no longer know who would enjoy this flick at all. It would give me nightmares. But it was the fact that he was so frail and skinny that also for me as an adult watching it, I was like, oh, fucking, I don't know.

Just knock him out at the knees. He couldn't take much. Oh, look, man, you got to see a photo of the guy. Well, his face is already quite funny.

I'm trying to find a good, a good image of him on, uh, on Google. Oh, that's good to share with all the people listening to the podcast. Good investment of time there, guy.

Yeah. Eventually, Tim, you are aware of a little thing called the gosh dang internet, aren't you? But yeah, I mean, I guess it was meant to read as scary. But I thought that, I mean, to look at that and then think of how far we've come by way of CGI

in the 20 years since was another satisfying moment. A win for technology? I don't know. Let me say this, though. I was shocked to see an example of bullet time in this film because it came out a full year before The Matrix did, which is sort of commonly credited as the one who kicked off that whole effect. But they've kind of got a version of it in this where they enter a wormhole, I think,

and time slows to an almost standstill while the camera rotates around the room. Yeah. I guess the trouble is, isn't it, that you've said it already, it's hard to care about the family who we're supposed to be rooting for, which means it's hard to care about their journey or story i also enjoyed at one point in the movie when simultaneously all three female leads are written out of the script uh as the action unfills lest one of them get hurt or i don't know what the reasoning is but there's literally like the entire climax of the film,

they're just cast aside in some... It's just how we used to make them, mate. It's how we did yarns back in the day. It's just how we built them. Yeah. Let the boys take over for this bit, eh? We'll make it interesting. But it turns out none of them were capable on delivering

except for the fabulously talented gary oldman who i can confidently say rip who they managed to fuck up with cgi so no one wins unfortunately did you just confidently rip gary oldman wait didn't he die no that dude is super alive i'm pretty sure he won an Oscar. Who am I thinking of? Who died like last year? Are you sure? Yeah, I'm 100% sure. Oh, my God. Do you know what it is?

There's a particular comedy show that our friends put together. Stop trying to kill all of these old actors. I'm so sorry. too hard stop trying to kill all of these old actors i'm so sorry they have a song um about how sad they'll be when gary oldman dies and i think i have seen that show so many times now i've seen about half a dozen times i've seen them perform that song so many times you're thinking of a song that's not about when gary oldman dies it's about when what is it about alan rickman did die oh god it's alan rickman i've It's about when Alan Rickman did die. Oh, God.

It's Alan Rickman. I've confused him for Alan Rickman is what's happened. This explains a lot. This is why I thought he was dead. Yeah. So it's a wild sort of series of confusions you've made there. Not just in who the actors are, but in the subject of the show that you have

genuinely seen like over half a dozen times yeah yeah i'm trying to connect some dots it's not going well for me that's for sure but yeah i mean it was just what do you i just checked out like the the the story's a mess the tone's a mess uh. Because of how long it's been since the movie was released, all of the impressive visual effects, or what were meant to be impressive visual effects, are a mess. And you're just left watching a few solid actors, you know, toil away with this clunky,

you know, nuts and bolts science fiction script. But not well done as well. Not good sci sci-fi it's not like good meaty sci-fi where they're actually doing real pseudosciencey stuff it's just gobbledygook you know nonsense wave a magic wand shit can we talk about the robot though guy uh yeah we can we can talk about the robot um so the the robot was an iconic figure of the 1960s show and they've modeled this robot thankfully on him i say thankfully it's quite it sticks out because it's like well why would you put three rotating light bulbs inside the brain of a modern day machine you'll be pleased to hear that dick tuffeld uh the original voice of the robot reprised his role for this film

that's fucking epic that's a good call, that's a good decision that's a nice way to try and bank on some nostalgia right there the vocal performance of the robot as it was in the 1960s show, which I guess this makes more sense

because it's the same actor it's so campy, it's just fucking, it's so campy. It's so big. It's so weird. And in this storyline, Will just offhandedly fuses parts of his brain into the robot as well. That really threw me for six.

I didn't spend any time on that. Will's just like, well, some of his circuits are fried, so I'm going to restore the missing bits of his personality with bits of my brain it's fucked yeah that is a pretty insane thing to do uh and so yeah because i mean i guess you know the longer we've gone the more curious we are about downloading or uploading our consciousness you know into ai or whatever and here they are sort of skirting around the edges of what is quite a fascinating concept uh but to no avail let me let me say this just as a

quick warning for anyone listening to this podcast as curious and interesting as that concept might be it should never justify you watching transcendence with johnny depp fuck me that is two hours of my life i wish i could take back do you know what one i was thinking of when i was talking about it spike jones is her yeah that was a great film beautiful color palette really beautiful you got to pick a smaller story i think lost in space got lost in its own arsehole of trying to tell this epic tale. Dang it, Tim. What? That's pretty good, but that's exactly how I wanted to start the podcast.

I wanted to say, Lost in Space, you're damn right. Okay, cool. I'm glad that you rerouted the conversation to insert that posthumously for our introduction, which is now dead. This film is lost. Like, I'm sure that that probably came up in a bunch of reviews because it's just, like, it threw a whole lot of big stuff in the pot, right? So it's very paint by numbers.

What have we got we've got a father and son relationship where the son is constantly looking for the affection and attention of their father that is a tale as old as time a powerful narrative but it's also uh put right alongside this will they won't they sexual tension which is kind of concocted because he's the graham wants no piece of Matt LeBlanc and Joey's just coming on like a skunk. I'd like to insert myself here and say this is true, but the one that shines through is the father-son.

That's what they go back to. The charisma that they wrangle out of the performers is closer to believable. There's no chemistry between Matt LeBlanc and Heather Graham. The idea that she would kiss out of the performers is closer to believable like there's no chemistry between matt leblanc and heather grant the idea that she would kiss him at the end uh i guess they were just following whatever rules they imagined were in place then uh like that that kiss you can see it coming from a mile away but it has no it has no place in the movie i think that like the central hook is that father-son relationship story.

We'll dig into that. But my God, she kisses him once on the cheek because he says, have I done enough for a kiss now? And she gives him that. And then she says, this one's on credit. And proceeds to fucking French kiss the guy in front of her entire, like less than six feet away from her entire family who just watch on an open-mouthed passionate kiss of their eldest daughter or sister and uh this this fucking guy who's almost got them killed a bunch of times and persistently is hitting on on the on judy it's just it's not good guys it's not

good stuff it's not a good moment and it's made all the more uncomfortable by having this weird sort of pseudo-Oedipal complex thing going on because of her physical proximity to her parents and her siblings it's very strange I felt very awkward watching it but it was also at the end of the film so I was more just furious at my time being lost but you're right the father and son thread is by far the strongest it serves a scene which is probably the the yeah i'd say the closest they get to emotional resonance in the film where there's a time traveling bit where they they meet an old and withered young will but he's old now and he's in the stead of um a now mutated uh dr smith who's who's all spied up now who's been looking after him on the planet,

just long enough so that Will can construct his time machine, and then he can jump in there, and get back to Earth to invade with the spiders. I liked that. I want to see that sequel, to be honest. I think that's a cool idea. Can I just quickly also say, Yeah.

Somehow, in spite of its runtime, the ending felt incredibly abrupt. Fuck yeah. They've cut something. Something else was there, right? Yeah, because it's like... Here's... It's like, oh, is the pressure too much?

Are we going to make it through the fucking planet or whatever hot nonsense they serve up for uh you know uh tension or stakes at the end and then it turns out that the pressure was enough and they make it through and then they're like roll credits i think it was one of those situations where they were so confident a sequel was imminent like not just it was going to happen but it was going to happen instantly that they were like yeah that's fine we'll pick it up in the second one and then it fucking tanked you're darn right it did did you see the financial performance of this film is that on your google box anyway yeah it outperformed its budget uh that's good yeah it cost... What are you going to cost to make, Tim? This film, 98.

48 million dollars. Double it and then take away 16. 80 million dollars. How much? 80. Yeah, and it returned 136.2. Okay. It's alright. It's alright, isn't it?

That's kind of what you want for one of these films you just whack it up sell some lunch boxes to the kids make a uh a banging hot soundtrack with some late 90s electronic artists that you can sell to 12 year olds in new zealand that's how you get your money back it's only with accounting guy that is where they got their money back uh look it's it's it was bad, and I've sort of run out of things to say about it, to be completely honest. Yeah, it is bad.

This is a film which we often teeter... Sorry, let me take that again. We often teeter when we watch a film as to whether or not you, our humble listeners, should watch it. You absolutely should not watch this film. There's nothing there for you. It's not bad enough to be interesting.

It's not coherent enough to be enjoyable. It's not emotionally resonant enough to elicit any kind of feeling in you. It's just a waste of two hours. And apparently, 80 million US dollars. Well done to everyone for being in it. You got through. You finished a a film i'm proud of you but i'm more proud of all the other surrounding projects you did and if i was to pick one i think eliza thornberry is the best you know i think the wild thornberries is the best attached project to lost in space 1998 it was a good project uh oh yeah and about our house it moves see my dad hosts a nature

documentary and my mom films it oh and there's darwin no and there's donnie we found him and darwin he found us and between you and me something amazing happened and now I can talk to animals do do do do do do do or something like that I really thought I thought you were reading that from the internet but you were free balling huh

I remembered it yeah I saw the feature length film at the cinemas I was a big Nickelodeon kid they made great content such good shows God they were excellent Yeah look

Hey guy The movie scores A review of Why don't you stay in space You know Lost in space Stay up there Because I don't want you coming back

With this malformed disaster Go ahead To round off Can I ask you one question Which is if you could change just one thing in the film to improve it what would you change uh matt leblanc's character the sort of gun ho uh sort of uh pilots guy the war hero pilot i would have recast him as lisa Kudrow. Nice work. Now that's sexual chemistry. Lisa Kudrow coming on hot to a Heather Graham in 1998.

People aren't going to see that coming. Yeah, that would be nice. That's not the only reason I'd recast it, but certainly a happy side effect. And what about you, Tim? I don't know quite how the ages and timelines stack up, but I'd swap out Will Robinson for the kid who played... Dewey.

What was that? No, what was that movie with... What was that movie with the mouse? Stuart Little. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The kid from Stuart Little. Oh, fuck, man. Have you seen a photo of that kid recently?

He got jacked. I've not. Oh, someone told me he's incredibly hot these days. It's probably those bloody boning skills. I didn't tell you he got hot. I told you he got jagged. I don't find muscly guys that sexy. Oh, okay.

You're more of a brooding, I've been bitten by a space spider and now I'm eight feet tall and have stolen from several different franchises kind of a guy. Yeah.nicki uh and i just quickly like to say for anyone who like he's not a bad looking guy now and he was obviously adorable as the child in both uh stewart little and jerry mcguire uh but if you want to see just the brutality of Wikipedia, look up Jonathan Lipnicki on his wiki page and the photo they have as his thumbnail

is a brutal adolescent shot from 2005 when the kid was 15 and clearly hormones were just fucking exploding out of every part of his body. I mean, there are photos like all of us at this age where we just look like, you know, gawkish idiots, but to put it up on profile in his wiki page is uh it's a funny touch whoever did it probably an ex-partner um i am racing to

get there uh before this ends oh that's not very nice that hair god that is some 2005 hair isn't it yeah real fucking hell mince and cheese too long by two inches um no other time in human history could that hair have existed he looks like uh someone needs to it looks like an extra from like one of the cool kid groups in the first season of the oc the hair and the shirt he's one puka shell necklace away from a hand job at a barbecue on the beach. I'd like to thank our sponsors for this episode. A huge shout out to the CBS sitcom, Man With A Plan. If you're wondering what Man With A Plan is,

an old school father encounters the modern challenges of parenting three school-aged children, marriage, and running a general contracting business with his brother after his supportive wife returns to work. He also has to deal with his overbearing parents. The series is set in suburban Pittsburgh and features Matt LeBlanc in the lead as Adam Burns, the patriarch of the Burns household.

Along with his brother Don, he owns Burns Brothers Construction. Well, I just quickly did Google to check that cbs was in the disney family and i can tell you that we are still confidently in the house of mouse so on that wonderful note thank you guy um for making sure we got our sponsorship obligations in there and uh thanks for listening everyone please pick a better movie for us to watch next time this was not fun in any way. So love all of you and we'll see you in the next one, eh? Jump on the Patreon, tell us what to watch. See ya.

Get us airborne. Hang on! Lost in Space. Today. You ready? Okay, let's go the hunt for the wildest movie of the summer ends here this is your super friendly and not aggressive reminder to buy tickets immediately borderlands now playing