I got to see the Land of the Lost movie. Don’t worry, it only cost my time. The reviews I’ve seen for this movie are all bad so I went into it with lowered
expectations. It was still worse than I was expecting.
The bad reviews I’ve read all commented on Will Farrel’s performance. When they mention the source material, the 1970s Saturday morning kid’s program, it’s in terms of “half-remembered kid-vid” or to mock its “cheesy” low-budget production values.
There are some of us to whom Land of the Lost was a well remembered and much loved part of our youth. The low-budget video green screen effects were not state of the art it’s true, and the acting was summer stock. But the writing and the concepts were as sophisticated as any other science fiction series on TV at the time, certainly the equal of Star Trek, Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. I was nine when it debuted. I was young enough (still am!) to be fascinated with the dinosaurs and sleestaks and old enough to know that the pylons and crystals and other internal mythologies made Land of the Lost head and shoulders above everything else the adult world was trying to “entertain” me with. It didn’t talk down to its audience. The cheesiness of it’s production was stagecraft, and good storytelling rises above its medium, and is told in the imagination of the viewer. The 1970s Land of the Lost was a quality product in a modest package.
I can only image what the person who green-lighted spending millions to make this new movie version was thinking. He obviously didn’t read the script. Maybe there wasn’t a script, just “Will Farrell in Land of the Lost” scribbled on a report of Farrell’s movies’ profits. No one involved respected the source material; that much is certain.
There was no parody of the original. It’s merely a modern frat-boy comedy in the thinnest skin of the original series. For it’s plot, they appropriated the most visible elements from the series: the sleestaks, the dinosaurs, the pylons. But there was no understanding of the borrowed items. The movie’s plot was stock, a standard Hollywood fill-in-the-blanks formula that had none of the imagination and intelligence of the “kid-vid” series. It insults the viewer’s intelligence in ways the original never did.
Before seeing it, I though the idea of making the Rick Marshall character a typical Farrell asshole was not a completely bad idea. The original character was too perfect and had little charisma. But the moviemakers made the entire cast, including the lovable Cha-Ka, into disgusting unlikable frat boys. They made the intriguingly amoral character Enik into a typical Hollywood villain. Of course, they made Holly into an adult “romantic interest” instead of the eleven year old daughter to avoid a family film label, and thank God they did. Children shouldn’t watch this.
Basically, the brilliant Hollywood producers took a children’s property and had to dumb it down to moronic levels to sell it to “adults”. That’s insulting all around. This movie has no reason to exist. And worst, it will probably prevent a serious well-budgeted treatment of the material from ever being made.
Maybe it’s for the best. It’s becoming apparent that screenwriter’s are becoming stupider every year.
