How much can a family take before their spirits break?
I bet when Dom, from Fast & Furious, said "Family" he pictured the Robinsons from Lost In Space in his head. The series is an incredibly well-executed reimagination. A sci-fi futuristic story based on a family on their way to a new planet after a crisis hits earth rendering the planet inahabitble.
Do not let the cute faces of the Robinson children fool you - the series is a serious nail-biter.
The first minutes of the pilot episode solidifies the future of the story's development. A look into the development of future events. I only clicked to watch the series because of its nostalgic name. What I didn't expect is an emotional roller-coaster.
Within the first few minutes of the story, the family is faced with an impossible situation. On their way to Alpha Centauri, their mother ship, The Resolute, is attacked by an alien which destroys the mothership.
This remains unknown to the Robinsons and they face their own catastrophe. Their personal ship gets stranded on an unknown planet, away from everybody else and away from Earth. For things to get worse, the ship then sinks into the water as the family barely escapes.
This leads to more problems. The mother, who is a very smart scientist and the smartest member of the family, is injured. The planet is getting colder and the only power cells are in the ship which is underwater and could freeze anytime.
With no other visible option, the father decides to send their youngest kid into the water to retrieve the power cells. However, his sister dives instead and the water begins freezing. And it does. With the girl inside.
Now, the mother is dying, the eldest daughter is frozen underwater, and the family is stranded. It is as if problems don't stop piling. And this is just the first few minutes into the pilot episode!
In such dire conditions, the father decides to take the son with him to retrieve helpful resources. They hike icy mountains and begin retrieving resources. The son then falls into a pit and is now disconnected from his father, but is relatively safe.
The father is now faced with another deadly conundrum. Leave the youngest son in an unknown and unreachable pit to retrieve the daughter from ice? Let the daughter die from suffocation and save the son? He decides to save the daughter and come back for the son.
Meanwhile, the son goes exploring the land he fell upon from the pit. He comes across a murderous alien and climbs a tree to save himself. Eventually, he tames the alien by saving its life. On the other side, the ice keeps refreezing and the girl is now out of oxygen completely.
Unbeknownst to the boy, the robot is the same one that attacked the Resolute. What a twist! But as it turns out, it and the boy arrive exactly in time to save the girl stuck in the ice. But the family is still a little bit weary of the giant alien robot.
This is how the show starts. In the coming episodes, the Robinsons face bigger and tougher problems. In almost every episode they face certain death. They come across another survivor and take her in, who we learn is a manipulative homicidal, and narcissistic psycho.
They learn to live with the loyal alien in secret, but the other survivors start to piece things together. When they find out they are afraid of it. The fuel in the ships is eaten by a weird alien eel. The food is short. Water is short. The planet is dying. The Resolute is unreachable.
In the second season, the Robinsons are completely disconnected from the other survivors who they helped escape from the dying planet. They survive on an inhabitable planet for 7 months with the psycho as a captive and a friendly hand, Don West the mechanic. Oh, they don't have the alien anymore, either.
No end to problems, they only keep piling up.
One thing I really loved about the series was the CGI. Granted that making a CGI planet and space is as imaginative as it gets. There isn't a specific draft to follow. But everything, including planets and aliens, Lost In Space does an incredible job at making everything look realistic.
I actively tried to look for botchy jobs. I was unsuccessful. The CGI was very well done and it adds to the legibility and relatability of the series. Piece by piece, everything was created meticulously and executed very professionally. I thoroughly enjoyed watching a series that delivered incredibly excellent CGI consistently.
There is however one thing I strongly felt. It is the PG rating suggested by Netflix - 6. The language is very tame, the gore is practically unavailable, there is almost 0 nudity. Very PG-6. BUT, the story isn't.
The amount of anxiety this shows throws at the audience should never be received by children. The Robinsons go through so much, including human treachery, manipulation, mind games, life-threatening situations, attacks, and face death. And most of this is faced by the Robinson children.
It was tough for me to watch this all, especially watching the kids go through all of that. I wonder how would this series ever be a family binge-night selection.
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