WARNING WILL ROBINSON! THE MOVIE YOU'RE IN SUCKS! WARNING!

OK, I've had my fun. Now for the review... Lost In Space is ... yes, you've guessed it ... a re-make of an old TV show! (As if you couldn't get enough of that these days.)

I will admit, I did used to watch the TV show an awful lot before I grew up and discovered Star Trek had a real message. But I was young and in the target audience (7 years old). To a certain degree, this film is aimed at the same audience, however with a PG-13 rating the 7-year-olds need someone else to take them to the theater. Hmmm ... pretty crappy planning if you ask me.

The story, what there is of one, concerns the survival of the human race. It turns out the human race is up the creek if they stay on Earth because we made it into a sewer. In 20 years, everyone dies. But wait! We found another planet we can turn into a sewer! We just have to get there.

Now, it turns out in 2058 we've stopped this war stuff we've been doing for thousands of years. (As if a mere 50 years of peace means it's really over.) Well, even that falls apart in the first scene, where we get a really great dogfight between the good people from the West and the bad people from the East. This implication that the Asians are the bad guys is really toned down. Probably someone discovered we sell a lot of movie tickets in Asia.

Meanwhile, Back in the Movie, the Robinson family is going to be blasted into space to go off to this nice new shiney planet and get a hyperspace gate working so everyone can leave Earth in time to go pollute the new planet. But then there's the bad guys. They want to get the planet for themselves and send their spy (Dr. Smith) to re-program the robot to kill the Robinsons 16 hours into the flight. Smith gets double-crossed and is trapped aboard as well.

OK, the robot flips out and starts shooting everything in sight until the 7-year-old kid hacks into its operating system. Of course, everyone in the family is a genius, but the family is completely dysfunctional. Sad to say, this dysfunctionality is the only thing in the story that engages the audience. Will's abandonment problems with his father becomes the crux of a very poorly scripted ending.

Lost In Space is crammed full of special effects, some of the best ever seen. The opening scene dogfight has raised the bar on anything George Lucas will have to do in the next Star Wars Trilogy. Computer generated images are found all over the place: in space, on people, in the hallway. The robot in both of its incarnations is really cool. But let's talk about that sucky ending.

No I'm not going to spoil it for anyone who has their heart set on seeing this film. The ending just doesn't work. Too many structures in the story don't line up. It feels as if key story elements have been dropped on the cutting room floor. (There's an alien space ship found in this movie that is never resolved in the story. Whose it is? Where did it come from?) If Lost In Space had a story, the editor killed this movie. If it didn't have a story, the director killed this movie.