BEFORE: I'm about halfway through this sci-fi chain, then some deft linking will set me up for September's "back to school" movies. Linking from "After Earth", Will Smith was also in the recent film "Winter's Tale" with William Hurt (last seen in "Alice")
AFTER: This is based on the old 1960's TV show of the same name, which itself was based on the book "The Swiss Family Robinson" - only in the book the title family got marooned on an island, not in outer space. And they were from Switzerland.
This film started out in a pretty promising way - once again the Earth had reached that "tipping point", where humans finally realized that they were going to use up all of the Earth's resources like clean water, so the search began for a new planet, called Alpha Prime (as opposed to Nova Prime, but what's in a name?). And here we got a look at the plan to bring all the humans to the new planet via a stargate, aka hyperspace. But to set up the stargate on the other end, first someone has to travel the new old-fashioned way, by traversing all of the distance between here and there. And for some reason, that person needs to bring his whole family along with him, even though they know nothing about building stargates. The teenage daughter protests being made to go, and I don't blame her - couldn't they find a guy who knew how to build a stargate and was also single? Seems like that would have cut down on the unnecessary baggage.
Anyway, the crew's planning to spend the 10-year journey frozen in their cryo-beds, because that process NEVER goes wrong (see also "Alien", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Planet of the Apes"). Hey, wouldn't you know it, but something goes wrong - you'd think with a title like "Lost In Space", we'd all see that one coming... They set this up so blatantly with the stargate, by saying that taking a random jump with the hyperdrive would be extremely risky - you don't know where you'll end up. Gee, guess what they end up doing?
To be fair, it's not really their fault. There's some kind of terrorist organization in the future, some seditionists who want to colonize Alpha Prime themselves. Yep, a whole new planet to colonize, not one human has set foot on it yet, and already they're arguing over the best way to do it. Seems about right.
But then this one sort of took a left turn after the ship goes through some kind of worm-hole or time portal (yeah, if you see a weird hole floating in space, you should TOTALLY take your ship into it...) and from then on, the plot devolves into your standard time-paradox story. They find a ship that's been looking for them for decades, even though they just left. Still, they don't figure it out until they crash-land on a planet and go through ANOTHER time-thingie, and are force to confront....well, I don't want to give it away. But it's a weird coincidence that the thing I don't want to give away tonight is the same sort of thing that I didn't want to give away twice before in the past week. God, you know it's killing me, not talking about it.
Anyway, once they start messing with the timestream (or their time-stream gets messed with, whichever you prefer) there's much debate about how to fix it. Should they go back to convince themselves to never leave Earth in the first place? (No, that's a paradox, because if they never leave, they'll also never get stranded, so then they'll never go back and tell themselves not to leave, so they'll leave, and so on) Should they make a smaller change to the timestream and try to escape the planet? (No, that presents a similar problem, because if they succeed, then no one will be marooned on the planet for 20 years to build the time machine, and then by fixing the problem, they've taken away the device that helped fix the problem.)
See, there's no good solution - not even the one that ends up "working". If you can't realize the paradoxes that time travel produces, maybe you just shouldn't have any time travel in your movie at all. I applaud the fact that time and space seem to be connected here - after all, if you travel a great distance it takes time, and if you travel at a very high speed, then time is relative and bends and your friends will age faster than you. That's a difficult concept for most people to grasp, but at least it makes more sense than time travel. They could have easily used either the cryogenics angle OR the fast-speed traveling angle to make time pass faster outside the spaceship - there was no real need to bring wormholes or time machines into the mix at all.
The sub-plot with the weird alien monkey character seemed very unnecessary, because it ended up going nowhere. It seemed like just a cheap attempt to have some cutesy creature for kids to enjoy, or perhaps to create a toy that kids would want to play with. If you think Jar-Jar Binks was unnecessary, the Blarp (?) character here has him beat.
Also starring Gary Oldman (last seen in "Lawless"), Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham (last seen in "Six Degrees of Separation"), Lacey Chabert (last seen in "Mean Girls"), Matt LeBlanc (last seen in "All the Queen's Men"), Jack Johnson, Jared Harris (last seen in "The Notorious Bettie Page"), with cameos from June Lockhart, Mark Goddard and Angela Cartwright from the old TV series.
RATING: 4 out of 10 metal spiders
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