LOST IN SPACE
Molly Parker heads Netflix's new sci-fi family
Netflix’s latest sci-fi series might be based on one 50-year-old TV show, but it actually feels like another.
Lost in Space (streaming on Netflix from April 13) is a bold reimagining of one-time King of Disaster Irwin Allen’s (The Towering Inferno) strangely subversive space-race era futuristic Swiss Family Robinson saga, which originally debuted in 1965.
However, given a dramatic reemphasis, the 2018 edition has more in common with the adventures of Captain Kirk and company that debuted a year later.
Skilfully updated to reflect our less starry-eyed and nuclear family dominated times, director Neil Marshall’s (The Descent) pilot episode sees the five-strong Robinson family instantly hit peril when their colonist ship crash lands on an unknown world.
Their vessel sinks, mother Maureen (Molly Parker) is injured, while eldest daughter Judy (Taylor Russell) finds herself trapped underneath a suddenly frozen lake. Strife is a common theme in the show’s action-packed first hour, with exasperated father Jack (Toby Stephens), noting that he ‘‘can only save one child at a time’’.
Cleverly these perils are juxtaposed with Lost-style flashbacks to the Robinsons life back on Earth, the marital strains Maureen and Jack had and the lengths some of them had to go to to ensure their place on the Jupiter 2. It’s this slow-dripped backstory, character flaws and the late episode one appearance of Parker Posey’s seemingly nefarious ‘‘Dr Smith’’ that will likely make viewers happy to get Lost in Space in large binge-watching bites.
Meanwhile, just over a year after it debuted in the US, TVNZ has finally got around to showing Kevin Williamson’s (Dawson’s Creek,
Scream) small-screen adaptation of Karl Alexander’s 1979 book Time After
Time (TVNZ2, Sundays, 10.50pm and on TVNZ OnDemand).
Both the book and TV series speculate on what might have happened had author H.G. Wells built a real time machine that both he and Jack the Ripper used to travel forward to a more modern world.
One of the biggest issues for this 11-part series (which was actually cancelled in America after just four aired) was the much-loved 1979 movie adaptation.
Directed by Nicholas Meyer (before he made two of the most popular Star Trek movies Wrath of Khan and The
Voyage Home), the cinematic version benefits greatly from casting two terrific actors as Wells and the Ripper. Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork
Orange) is perfect as the utopianseeking Wells, while David Warner
(Tron) oozes menace as the nefarious John Stevenson. In comparison, Freddy Stroma (UnREAL) and Josh Bowman (Revenge) just don’t really register as remotely as memorable.
While it has dated in some respects, it’s also hard not to see the 1979 version as a useful template for James Cameron when it came to plotting out the contemporary scenes in his Arnie-starring time-travel tale just a few years later.
Williamson and company have tweaked the formula for 2016’s Time, switching the action from San Francisco to New York, which has the unfortunate effect of reminding TV sci-fi fans of the endearing Forever, the Ioan Gruffudd-starrer so cruelly cut short by the same network in 2015.