Quote:
Originally Posted by scoundrel
None of the other adult players is at all bad, but the show stealer is certainly Gary Oldman as the sly and treacherous Dr Smith, a sabateur caught on the spaceship he intended to destroy and forced to seek a tenuous truce as a prisoner of people who know he tried to murder them. Oldman brings out the extremely dark humour of his character's personality, the man's cheerful acceptance of his own wickedness and remarkably accurate assessment of the individual traits of his captors. For entirely selfish reasons which he does not bother to pass off as anything other than totally selfish, Dr Smith saves the party more than once; and to their bitter annoyance he is simply too useful to shoot, even though its all his fault they are lost in space anyway.
I reckon about 5/10 and most of that because I thought the cast was not too bad.
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The entertainment value in this film is all about Dr. Smith.
This is a case of a great actor making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Jonathan Harris played Dr Smith in the television series as a Paul Lynde type closeted gay poltroon, who really should be kept away from Will Robinson, for heaven's sake, but Oldman as they say "takes the character in another direction"
Oldman finds a sinister vein in him that isn't camp, its genuinely malignant, while at the same time having some affection for the Robinsons. You can Oldman's character to Paul Reiser's corporate weasel in Aliens . . . but Oldman brings a lot more gravitas to the role.
The strange casting choice here is William Hurt, who is no kind of heroic leading man, sucks the life out of the movie.