Re: *** Official LAND OF THE LOST Review Thread
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Originally Posted by Nathan Eddy
Doing a remake of Land of the Lost. Again: what were you expecting?
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How about a movie that doesnt piss all over the fans of the original by making it a stupid bodily functions comedy.
Sure the original was an extremly low budget show with dodgy stop motion special effects, some pretty wooden acting and lots goofy moments, but the show was wildly imaginative and the writing team (headed by story editor David "I invented the tribble" Gerrold, along with science fiction writers Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon, Ben Bova, Norman Spinrad, D.C. Fontana, Walter Koenig and Donald F Glut) brought some pretty heavy storytelling to the table. Okay, when you get right down to it, it was still a kids show, but it had concepts like stable time loops, closed universes, parallel dimensions, causality and other meaty concepts - even going so far as to bring a linguist onboard to design a simple Pakuni language. It didn't talk down to the kids, it tried to work on several levels - kind of how Rocky and Bullwinkle did, but without the constant rapid fire puns - and above all, it was COOL.
Gone is virtually everything that made the original television series so fun and memorable, replaced by light and noise, poo and pee jokes. Remember when I said that the wooden acting (and overacting) was plentiful in the original? I'll take wooden over insulting and incompetent any day of the week - it's never a good sign when Matt Lauer delivers the least irritating performance in your movie. Director Brad Silberling indulges Ferrell in all manner of clearly improvisational "humor", letting scenes play out long, long after it's clear the joke isn't working. It's a classic example of the Will Ferrell School of Comedy: if people aren't laughing, just yell your lines louder.
And remember how I said the original special effects were of the sub-Ray Harryhausen blue screen variety? The effects here on display are reasonably convincing, but at no point in the film will you actually think that is taking place on anything other than a Hollywood sound stage. At least the slow-moving and bug-eyed Sleestaks are reasonably faithful re-creations of the original Basketball Players in painted wetsuits suits.
And then there's the plot - and I use the term VERY loosely.. While the original series had it's share of clunky moments, it was reasonably intelligent - for what it was. There was a strong emphasis on family, some heady scientific notions made accessible for kids, and a surprising amount of continuity episode to episode. Here, we don't even get the continuity. The plot plays out more like a series of extended Saturday Night Live sketches material with a higher than normal rate of mis-steps. And while I don't pretend to know what kids like today, the original was family friendly (admittedly in a scary, send the kids behind the sofa kind of way). Here, it's just an endless stream of vulgarity. Chaka takes every opportunity he can to grab Holly's breasts, hump Will's leg and even makes a move for Rick's junk at one point. Rick covers himself in dinosaur pee to disguise his scent and gets a hickey from a super-sized mosquito.
This is funny?
Actually, that's one of the main problems of the movie - the creative team (and again, I use that term in the broadest sense of the word) has no idea what demographic they're shooting for. Is Land of the Lost a kid-centric adventure? A randy adult-skewed comedy? A nostalgic trip for the Child of the Eighties? It's too bawdy for families, too boring for adults and simply downright insulting for the fans who fondly remember the show from their distant childhoods.
It's probably clear by this point that I love the original Land of the Lost. In many ways, it was my gateway drug as a kid, opening the door to weird dimensions, temporal paradoxes, pulp adventure novels, science fiction, and all kinds of fantasy, priming the pump for the worlds that Star Wars would whisk me away to in a couple of years. But it's not so much that the Land of the Lost was some kind of perfect sacred cow that should never be touched - I'll freely admit that the original had it's share of problems. And it's not that I'm instantly repulsed by the idea of remakes - I really enjoyed last year's vastly underrated Speed Racer. The real problem is that Land of the Lost only serves to point out that Hollywood is basically just a vast money-grubbing industry which only cares about making a quick few million bucks regardless of any critical "quality" of their products or the feelings of the fans.
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