Lost In Space gets lost in translation to the big screen.

One hundred and thirty minutes. That’s the official runtime of Lost In Space (1998), but it feels a lot longer; the kind of theatrical endurance test that makes you check your watch, then the horizon, then your life choices. It’s not the worst film ever made, but it’s right on the event horizon of that cinematic black hole.

Set in a distant future where Earth teeters on the brink of environmental collapse, the Robinson family, led by Professor John Robinson (William Hurt) and his scientist wife Maureen (Mimi Rogers), are tasked an interstellar colonisation mission to Alpha Prime. Their goal: to establish a hyper gate on the other side of the galaxy and pave the way for humanity’s survival. Accompanying them are their children Judy (Heather Graham), awkward boy-genius Will (Jack Johnson), and eye-rolling teenager Penny (Lacey Chabert). They’re joined by hotshot pilot Major Don West (Matt LeBlanc) and, unbeknownst to the crew, cowardly saboteur Dr Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman), whose sabotage forces the crew to make an unplanned hyperspace jump which leaves them…well, lost in space.

The stakes may sound galactic, but the energy is mostly inert. Lost In Space isn’t simply a bad adaptation – it’s a masterclass in how not to make the leap from episodic retro camp television to modern blockbuster spectacle. The original series was silly, yes, but it had a distinct charm, and a clear sense of purpose. This? This is what happens when a studio pumps money into a property it doesn’t understand, hands it to people who don’t seem to care, and hopes a familiar catchphrase or two will carry the audience through.

At the time, it was very much in vogue to strip the kitsch out of sixties television properties and try to reforge them into serious cinematic shape. You can feel the same aesthetic cowardice here that would, just a couple of years later, stick Bryan Singer’s X-Men in black leather instead of their comic-book finery. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood convinced itself that bright colours and genre fidelity were incompatible with big budgets and bigger audiences. It wasn’t just The Robinsons who were hopelessly lost and it would take the best part of a decade or two – and a change in generational stewardship – for the genre to navigate its way back out of that stylistic cul-de-sac.

TV series by their nature have a different narrative DNA to films. They can afford, and often need, redundancy in their character roster, to spread character development across episodes and share the storytelling load. Movies, by contrast, need tighter focus but instead of streamlining the ensemble or reconfiguring the relationships for a cinematic format, Lost In Space tries to cram it all in, like a greatest hits album compiled by someone who’s only ever skimmed the liner notes. Characters that existed to distribute the episodic load on television become dead weight in a two-hour-plus feature, narrative ballast that drags down the momentum and threatens to sink the whole thing.

Of the bloated cast list, perhaps three characters have any genuine narrative purpose, and only Gary Oldman appears to have understood the assignment. His take on Dr Smith leans into oily villainy with theatrical glee, oozing malfeasance and milquetoast menace with a performance that honours the great Jonathan Harris without falling into parody or impersonation. Everyone else flounders. William Hurt looks like he’s lost a bet, giving what might be the most uninterested performance of his career, while Mimi Rogers and Heather Graham are so underused they may as well have been cardboard standee set dressing. It’s particularly galling that the script gives the female characters so little to do it ends up being more regressive than its 1960s forebear who at least gave Mrs and both Ms Robinsons light domestic duties as a bare minimum. Jack Johnson’s Will Robinson suffers the most from the same script-induced character collapse, though. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman saddles him with so much implausible techno-babble exposition and so little emotional plausibility that it becomes impossible to really root for him. Jared Harris’ unexpected appearance later on at least offers a brief flicker of interest, if only because he seems to have wandered in from an entirely different film, armed with a different dialect coach, but by the time the film reveals its timey-wimey central conceit, you’ll have long since wandered off looking for an escape pod.

As if all that wasn’t enough squandered talent, we’re also treated to the spectacle of Matt LeBlanc playing Joey Tribbiani playing Major Don West and immolating his hopes of a big screen career in a single movie. It’s all squints, clenched jawlines and faux-macho posturing, delivered with the thespian finesse of ‘smell the fart’ acting taken to a whole new level. Of all the cast, he’s the most catastrophically miscast and he’s so bad you don’t really regret that his movie career never recovered from this first step faceplant.

Tonally, Lost In Space can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it a family adventure? A grimdark sci-fi epic? A Star Trek-style space opera? The result is a noisy, shapeless mass of narrative flotsam and jetsam, sloshing from set-piece to set-piece with no central spine – and no clear idea of who its hero is at any given moment. Journeyman director Stephen Hopkins (A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, Predator 2) does a decent job of getting the junkpile jumbotron of a movie from point A to B but is hampered by CGI so bad – even by the standards of the time – it would have been rejected by Babylon 5, with the pointless digital alien monkey Blarp the absolute nadir of the visual effects work. Perhaps the money was spent on the physical sets, which are sleek and expensive looking – a likely investment in the expectations of sequels that would never get a chance. Even the model work is first rate, the crash of the Jupiter 2 showing why, despite improving digital effects work, practical effects have managed to hang on in there.

In the final twenty minutes, as the story stumbles into the realm of temporal paradoxes and more ambitious science fiction ideas, there’s a sense of scale and scope that edges towards intriguing but by then the damage is already done and unlike the time travel twist, irreversible. The performances are adrift, the audience has checked out, and all that’s left is a faint echo of what might have been if the filmmakers had trusted the material or the audience.

It never comes close to capturing the spirit of the original show – neither its goofy optimism nor its forward-looking sense of exploration. Instead, it slogs through a joyless collection of confused catch-phrases, unearned character beats and cringe-inducing SFX showcasing career worst moments for everyone involved.