Hacker Cinema
Lost in Space
1998 · Film · 130 min
Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Science FictionAdventureAction
The prospects for continuing life on Earth in the year 2058 are grim. So the Robinsons are launched into space to colonize Alpha Prime, the only other inhabitable planet in the galaxy. But when a stowaway sabotages the mission, the Robinsons find themselves hurtling through uncharted space.
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11 comments on Hacker News
Hey some fellow green line enjoyers! I'm working on a small side project I'm calling a "Terminal-punk Fantasy Art Game" at spellkaster.app to scratch my cyber-itch.
Escape from New York has some amazing cyberpunk UI aesthetic, so does Jurassic Park and the 90's Lost in Space movie. Lost in Space in particular has some absolutely gorgeous scifi UI.
There is also a youtube channel called 'Datawave FM - midfi synthwave radio for retro computer funk' that has amazing music and visuals.
The Matrix ranks third in my list of 'wow' moments in the cinema.
Joint first is the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and brontosaurus (?) in the true-dinosaur scene of Jurassic Park (not the raptor eggs bit).
SPR's opening was just visceral, especially on a huge cinema screen.
And Jurassic Park's use of the subwoofer meant you really felt that first scene.
FWIW Lost in Space, the year before the Matrix had 'bullet time' in it and no-one seems to remember that.
> That terrible Lost in Space movie
I'll never defend "Lost in Space" as a cinematic tour-de-force in the traditional sense but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most quintessentially-90s films ever made. It has Silicon Graphics logos and bubble-shaped silver electronics everywhere. William Hurt managed to find time to slip away from the "Dark City" set to make an appearance. Pre-Felicity Shagwell/post-Rollergirl Heather Graham fends off advances from Joey Tribbiani while the crazy guy from "Leon: The Professional" makes a bunch of bizarre wisecracking non-sequiturs. A brash Big beat remix of the original TV theme blares over the credits immediately following a fight involving a giant CGI (SGI?) spider.
I disliked it intensely as a kid but enjoy it a lot in retrospect because of my high-resolution nostalgia goggles.
Rosencrantz and Stansfield made him my favorite actor for the first decade of my adulthood. Zorg is okay. That terrible Lost in Space movie lowered his trajectory for a while. He’s been hitting home runs a lot since.
But if you hear him in interviews he thinks of himself as a working actor. He’s doing the job. But the right people think he can do a good job so he’s getting better roles.
Cue the lost in space movie with beans, instead of potatoes...
Teacher is totally right. I used to be a movie buff, I started with the best movies and drilled down like. If I like a movie, I will check director or hero/heroine and start watching their flims. This started in 2004 beginning of torrents. I almost all movies, I ever liked in a 2tb hard disk. Nowadays I just re-download for better print but even I am not sure why I am doing I do it. When it started to hitt downturn is, at a point I was watching movies just to understand what the director is trying to tell as someone has produced this movie. I slowly started to cut back like I don't watch movies if it's more than 130mins and started cutting down the time.
If is say what's my best its mostly the ones between 1980 to 2005. Everything after that was too much CGI or it was like okay movie.
Like comedies I liked were Encino man, son in law, first few parts of police academy, jury duty.
Action movies Conair, lost in space, broken Arrow, specialist, assassins. Desperado.
> I haven't finished Atlantis or Universe yet. They're on my to-watch list.
Ooh, I _really_ enjoyed SGU. Granted, it was the kind of show that I had to try watching once, give up on, then rewatch years later during to really appreciate. It's fairly different from SG1 and SGA, but in my (humble) opinion, it's really good and I'm sad that it ended so quickly. It reminds me a bit of Lost In Space (the movie, not the relatively new tv series- I've only seen half the pilot so I can't make a comparison) but in the Stargate universe.
This is exactly how my sleep schedule has evolved as well. And last night I just happened to have one of these vivid dreams described by the article. Then I wake up and see the NatGeo article posted.
Coincidence? No, I think everyone that participates in society has a rhythm that has been interrupted for the first time in a long time (many decades, see Eric Weinstein "Great Nap"), and the result is all of our cerebral hardware activating in the same way in order to make sense of this new normal. We are told it is temporary, but 3-4 weeks is required to form new habits, and the disruption has lasted that long for me.
On top of all that, after waking at 4am (as you also have been), I look at my phone. Nothing. Then not 30 seconds later, someone replies to one of my YouTube comments on a battery chemistry video.
(Bear in mind I am fresh out of a rather nightmarish vision, which from what I could tell was basically an assimilation of a lifetime of memories of every movie and video game situation ive ever experienced where there are hordes of invasive aliens or zombies. The implication of the scenarii was that I had access to plenty of guns and ammunition, but opted to go without because I did not think the situation was that bad. Then I realized it was perhaps worth worrying about and regretted being without a weapon, at which point I noticed all the invaders being attracted to a local heat source where they were destroyed, like Lost In Space (1998) where Joey from Friends overdrives the fusion core to distract and destroy the horde).
So after I read the comment I am immediately wide awake and completely engaged with the parent thread and video. I get onto an abnormally focused research vector for a couple hours (no need for coffee), and buy a few chemicals to experiment with.
Spent a few hours before the weird REM trip in a very long video chat with friends from way back in high school.
I suppose nostalgia is like an antidepressant at this point (antidepressant implies sweeping the dirt under a rug, which makes the room look cleaner but what made it dirty is still in the room)
The first thing I thought of after trying the Kinect was the robot in the reboot Lost in Space. At one point the kid uses a VR type device to control the robot and right off hundreds of space spiders. Not so great a movie, but very cool looking piece of technology.
The potential for a interesting control schemes using Kinect is just amazing.
I agree with the comments on the linked article, I liked the Speed Racer movie too. On the other hand, I thought the Lost In Space movie was worse than the original series. I was a kid when all three of these Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Lost in Space were originally out, so we'll see how it goes. What's next though, Marine Boy, that's the only other major cartoon from the 70s left, that I can remember. Or maybe they'll do an Ultraman movie rather than the pukey Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers that supposedly evolved from it.
After Microsoft bought softimage and delegated its development resources to porting SI|3D to WINNT and further architecture Sumatra (code name for XSI) to be NT only, there were only a few more blows to SGI that topled the castle.
Alias/Thomson division of SGI was merged with newly bought Wavefront into Alias|Wavefront - they've spent money on wavefront, and delegated AW to build a new platform, code name Maya, to compete with newly announced Sumatra. So, basically PowerAnimator and Explore products they already had lacked sales suddenly in awaiting of Maya (20,000$ list price + 20K for each of the modules, like artisan for example - really).
Then there was talks with Microsoft regarding OpenGL future - both of them tried to join powers and bring the world Fahrenheit... Microsoft though bought some small company making what was later known as DirectX.
Discreet (makers of high end compositing and editing applications) was bought by Autodesk and joined with their Kinetix group (formed by autodesk and yost group - makers of 3d studio) to consolidate new media division in Autodesk. Future plans were to migrate/and or/ develop new "systems" platform to linux. This materialized some years later, though not in full capacity. It showed its teeth when AVID strongarmed into PC market though.
With all this happening, SGI also introduced PC line of workstations with some innovative architecture designs (Cobalt) - which was ridiculously priced in heavy competition by then Intergraph Z workstations and Sun. There was a nice commercial tie in with movie lost in space - which, ironically was mostly made with 3dsmax (it's first feature credits)
ATI bought ART-X which made custom graphics chip for N64 among other things and Nvidia was hard pressed into buying talent around - mostly from advanced graphics division of SGI. This resulted in suffering in new lines of graphics workstations from SGI - like Octane2, Fuel and Tezro. Monster Reality engine was pretty much dead in the water by then - only brute force doubling of power.
And the cookie crumbled. SGI was almost fully vertically integrated hardware manufacturer - they had financial trouble. So they have ditched Alias|Wavefront as Alias to some investment fund (which refurbished it and sold it to Autodesk), MIPS division went from processor manufacturer to IP core provider only. R&D left to Nvidia, with appropriate patents (sold to Nvidia). PC division was dead. All that was left was HPC which sgi with its cray division focused on - unsuccessfully. Even though Altix platform is/was great - it was in direct collision with companies like Sun, RackSaver and most importantly IBM. IBM was still fully vertically integrated (almost still is) and had lots of money to throw around. It also had several strong HPC platforms (instead of one), and even grabbed a console processor market from MIPS/SGI in a feud before.
SGI is a sad story of bad decisions and bad timing. Had it kept media division and bought Discreet and Softimage instead of Cray, or even along with it. Had it scaled down MIPS to IP core only after lost war with IBM and reallocated resources better to align with Microsoft's vision of Talisman by keeping its R&D lab doing Talisman... Today we would have a company that would be a hybrid of a DCC giant and Nvidia. Now we only have a nice memory of turquoise and crimson wet dreams.