Category: Movies

Direct Beam Comms #123

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Lost in Space

The Lost in Space franchise has been around longer than the Star Trek franchise, yet while there’s been more than 700 episodes of Star Trek on TV and 13 movies in the last 50 years, with Lost in Space there was only the original 93 episodes of TV that ended in 1968 and one poorly received film in 1998. But the original concept behind the series is even older. It’s based on the novel Swiss Family Robinson from 1812 about a family marooned on an island after a shipwreck which was almost certainly inspired by the even earlier story Robinson Crusoe from 1719.

Lost in Space
Lost in Space

Lost in Space has been gone so long that there are a few generations of people who’ve grown up without it, and their only connection to the material is the series’ catch phrase, “Danger, Will Robinson!” I know I’ve only ever seen a smattering of classic Lost in Space episodes as I don’t ever remember it rerunning in my area when I was a kid.

While there hasn’t been much Lost in Space since that 1998 movie that starred William Hurt, Mimi Rogers and Gary Oldman there was an attempt to reboot Lost in Space on The WB in 2004 that would have starred Adrianne Palicki (currently starring in The Orville) as Judy Robinson. But that series never got any further than a single pilot episode and was never brought to series.

The Jupiter 2
The Jupiter 2

But now, 50 years after the original 1960s series ended comes a new Netflix version of Lost in Space. Starting Molly Parker and Toby Stephens as Maureen and John Robinson, the duo along with their three kids are part of an evacuation of the Earth after it was hit by a comet causing an ecological disaster. But instead of ending up where they were supposed to be the Robinsons were separated from the rest of their colonists when their ship the “Jupiter 2” crash landed on an uncharted planet. This planet is full of wonders and dangers as the family must overcome obstacle after obstacle in order to survive even their first day lost in space.

I enjoyed this new Lost in Space if there was a bit too much, erm, danger going on in the first episode for my taste. If it’s not the family crash landing on the planet than it’s Maureen breaking her leg or Judy (Taylor Russell) trapped in ice or young Will (Maxwell Jenkins) being lost in a woods … and that’s not all that happens in the first episode that feels overloaded.

Lost in Space isn’t Stranger Things or even something like The Expanse — and I think that’s a good thing. This new show feels more like a family adventure show, something that’s really not made anymore. I’m interested to see where this new Lost in Space goes, if I hope it slows down a bit on the whole family in peril every few minutes thing.

The Expanse

Over the last few years the one bright, shining spot on the Syfy channel has been The Expanse. There was a lot of talk when this series premiered that Syfy was trying to turn its act around, to become more like the channel it used to be that ran series like the Battlestar Galactica reboot rather than what it had become known for more recently as the home to cheap-o movies and schlocky genre reality series. Yet here we are three years later and Syfy still airs those cheap-o movies and is still producing schlocky reality shows.

The Expanse
The Expanse

Oh well, while it might be on a channel questionable character, it doesn’t take away from the fact that The Expanse is still one of the best series on TV no matter where it happens to air.

I remarked at the time The Expanse debuted that we were experiencing a dearth of “very large ships in outer space” shows. Which three years later we still mostly are — there’s also Star Trek: Discovery that covers this same sort of ground too but that’s the only other one I can think of. Which is really odd. We live in a time where sci-fi, horror and other genre series are king yet the most traditional sci-fi show out there of people zipping around the cosmos in ships is still mostly missing from the crop of current series. I’m not sure if this is because that “very large ships” bandwidth is being taken up by 700+ episodes of Star Trek that seem to air in constant rotation on TV, not that I’m complaining since I love that stuff, or if what’s popular sci-fi now are more Earth based shows like Black Mirror or Westworld? But the last few years The Expanse has been filling a very large hole as it were in my sci-fi yearnings since there’s not much else out there new that’s like it.

The crew of the Rocinante
The crew of the Rocinante

In The Expanse, it’s a few hundred years in the future where mankind has colonized most of the solar system. People are living on the Moon, Mars and on asteroids out in the “belt.” But even though it’s a bright, shiny future we’re still squabbling over petty things and mankind isn’t going to let a little thing like the discovery of something in the depths of space that threatens all life in our solar system dissuade us from having an all out solar-system war with the Earth on one side, Mars on the other and the people living in the belt caught in the middle.

Much of the first two seasons of The Expanse focused on the lead-up to and the eventual start of this war and this new third season of the show picks up mere moments after the second season ended, with the solar system exploding in war all around the crew of the Rocinante while the one person who might be able to stop the bloodshed Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is being held hostage on a ship far out in space.

Much like with the Battlestar Galactica reboot The Expanse isn’t a show viewers can just start watching now, three seasons in. There’s so much backstory going on from plot to character relationships to politics it’s really only possible to start watching this show from the beginning.

So, if you haven’t seen The Expanse yet do yourself a favor and check the first two seasons first before jumping into this new third one. But it’s worth your time and effort to do so.

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Size Does Matter

CategoriesFeature, MoviesPosted on

There was never any realistic way the 1998 movie Godzilla was ever going to measure up to the hype. That summer was a crowded one with lots of movies people were exited about seeing like Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan and The X-Files. But the number one movie that everyone absolutely, positively HAD to see was Godzilla.

Godzilla stomps NYC
Godzilla stomps NYC

The marketing for Godzilla was perfection. It never actually revealed the whole monster but instead would play on the size of it. There were billboards that read, “He is twice as tall as this sign.” With ads on the sides of busses reading, “His foot is as long as this bus.” And everything featured the tagline, “Size does matter.” I remember spending hours that summer scouring the internet for any information on Godzilla I could find, just happy one day to finally uncover an audio clip of its new roar.

Even the poster for Godzilla only ever revealed the monster’s foot smashing down on a New York City street.

I remember how secretive the creators of the film were about anyone seeing the newly designed Godzilla before the movie was released. So much so that reportedly there was a misinformation campaign where certain manufacturers would get fake designs of the monster in order to track down any leaks to the media. I worked retail at the time and remember we received a shipment of Godzilla branded t-shirts with the whole of the Godzilla monster on it before the release of the movie. And instead of reading the side of the shipping box that read, in no uncertain terms, that these shirts should remain in the backroom until the release of Godzilla on May 20, 1998, some employee in fashions worked them out to the floor. And that’s where they stayed until a manager found them, gathered them up by the armful and ran them back to the storeroom where they’d sit for a few more weeks.

Matthew Broderick & Maria Pitillo
Matthew Broderick & Maria Pitillo

People were most excited that Godzilla was the follow-up movie from writers/director Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich who were coming off one of the most successful films of all time Independence Day. It was thought that while Independence Day was hugely successful Godzilla would be even more so since it was based on an existing property people had been clamoring for years to see a big-budget Hollywood version of.

And with Godzilla that’s what they were going to get — the marketing had been telling them that for months before the release of the movie.

The first sign that something was wrong with the film was that when the reviews came out they were tepid at best, negative at worst. I’d spent so much time looking forward to Godzilla over the previous months that I found myself concentrating on one review that said (sic), “The movie might not be good but I still want to see it again,” as a sort of affirmation that the reviewer was wrong since who’d ever want to see a bad movie twice?

Godzilla 1998I saw Godzilla opening weekend and remember liking it enough when I saw it but not having a lot of time to dwell on it since there were so many movies out that year that I wanted to see coming soon after the release of Godzilla. And watching it again 20 years later I’d say that while Godzilla isn’t a great movie, it isn’t a bad one either. It suffers in that Godzilla feels like three movies stuck together rather that one coherent whole. Still, when Godzilla stomps New York for the first time it’s truly awe inspiring even decades later.

While Godzilla wasn’t the runaway success that Independence Day was a few years before, it made less money than the likes of Doctor Dolittle and The Waterboy also released in 1998, it wasn’t a failure as legend around the film suggests. It made a respectable $380 million at the box office in 1998 which, with inflation, makes it about $578 million in today’s dollars.

In fact, with inflation 1998 Godzilla was actually more successful than 2014 Godzila that was considered a success. Or enough of a success to warrant a sequel movie, Godzilla vs Kong, that’s due in theaters in a few years.