After 28 Years, Tubi's Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasure Is a Streaming Phenomenon

The idea of a gritty reboot that takes an old, cheesy thing and makes it serious and cool may seem like a relatively new concept, but Hollywood has been doing it for decades — if not longer. Either way, one of the great examples of the trend is 1998’s Lost in Space, an action reboot of the classic sci-fi family comedy of the same name from the ‘60s, and though the film isn’t exactly a beloved classic, it holds a bit of cult-classic appeal. In fact, after landing on free streaming service Tubi recently, Lost in Space has begun flying up its top 10 list.

The original Lost in Space, which still had some cultural cachet in the ‘90s when there was more of a market for retro TV (The Office didn’t exist yet, which means nobody could endlessly rewatch The Office), is loosely based on the classic novel The Swiss Family Robinson. In the show, a family (the Robinsons, naturally) is sent off on a mission to prepare for colonization of other planets in response to overcrowding on Earth. Unfortunately, a bad guy tries to sabotage their ship and gets stuck onboard as it launches, with his machinations and extra weight throwing the vehicle off course and sending him and the Robinsons off to an uncharted world. There was also a robot, named Robot, who became so famous that he transcended the show.

Why Is the ‘Lost in Space’ Movie a Guilty Pleasure?

Here’s the thing about the Lost in Space movie: It seems like it could be, or maybe even should be, a slam dunk. For starters, the cast is absolutely absurd (especially for 1998), with William Hurt playing the dad, Mimi Rogers as the mom, Lacey Chabert and Heather Graham playing two of the three kids, Matt LeBlanc playing the cool guy pilot, and a somewhat notable actor named Gary Oldman playing the villainous Dr. Smith. The great Jared Harris even shows up later in a spoiler role that we’ll get to in a moment.

The problem is one that’s inherent to most gritty reboots, which is to say that Lost in Space is mostly charmless and takes itself too seriously for there to be much fun of any kind. None of the actors are particularly engaged, even Oldman, who should be having the time of his life as an evil scientist who is stuck helping a family survive in space. Imagine the scenery he could be chewing!

That being said, it is kind of fun. There’s some horrific CGI that is weirdly neat to look at, and there are moments that try so hard to be big crowd-pleasing action scenes that they kind of are, and there’s a late-movie twist that is so weirdly dark that you have to admire the audacity a little bit. That’s where Jared Harris comes in: After eventually landing on a mysterious planet, the family discovers a “time bubble” (for lack of a more coherent term) that takes them into the future. There, they discover that everyone has been killed except for the youngest kid (now played by Harris) and Dr. Smith (who has become a spider monster).

Unfortunately, it is not as interesting as that makes it sound, but it is still interesting — in a weird, boring way. It’s surprisingly easy to see why kids who saw it in the ‘90s remain kind of baffled-yet-fascinated by it, because audiences who are just discovering it now are likely just as baffled-yet-fascinated. It’s also easy to see why Netflix figured that the concept had enough juice to justify a second attempt at a gritty reboot, with that one being much more successful than the first.