“Lost in Space” is back from the darkest recesses of the cosmos.
Arrow Video, one of the great boutique home video labels, is bringing Stephen Hopkins’ 1998 space opera, based on Irwin Allen’s 1965 television series, back with a deluxe 4K UHD package stuffed with special features this September. And as part of the release, Arrow has created a modern-style trailer, which you can watch below.
If you never saw “Lost in Space” when it was originally released, it smartly repurposed many elements from the original series – the robot (voiced, once again, by Dick Tufeld), the villainous Doctor Smith (played here by a mustache-twirling Gary Oldman) and the Robinson family (‘90s all-stars William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham and Lacey Chabert) – while adding more twists and turns. If the original series was “Swiss Family Robinson” in space, this was considerably more complex. And much of that should be given to Hopkins, who was one of the more underrated auteurs of the decade, consistently bringing audiences thrilling, visually inventive popcorn movies.
It was also a hugely important movie for New Line Cinema, which had built its legacy on low budget horror movies and, around the time of “Lost in Space,” adventurous indies like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights.” But “Lost in Space” was a full-blown, big budget sci-fi adventure made for the broadest audience possibly and at a premium price tag (it reportedly cost $80 million, which is close to $160 million today). While New Line Cinema saw it as a potential franchise, this wound up being the lone “Lost in Space” outing. (There was, subsequently, a 2004 TV pilot and a Netflix series from 2018 to 2021.) In many ways “Lost in Space” set the template for “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” released a few years later by New Line Cinema.
Arrow’s new release is a wonderful combination of legacy special features and newly created supplements, including archive audio commentaries (with Hopkins and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman), new interviews with Hopkins, cinematographer Peter Levy and Goldsman, along with newly filmed material with Kenny Wilson, who worked at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop at the time, a documentary about the movie’s sound and a video essay by critic Matt Donato. This, along with archival featurettes, deleted scenes, a Q&A with the cast of the original series, blooper reals and gorgeous new artwork.
You can preorder this new “Lost in Space” now – it arrives on September 1 in the UK and on September 2 in the United States and Canada.
