Lost in Space
This is surprisingly hard sci-fi for something for kids, very progressive in social mores, and absolutely against any kind of militarism. This is basically what the Star Wars prequels should be.
The source material is a painfully 50’s sci-fi sitcom, like a more serious version of The Jetsons. Everyone has regular family problems, but every single family member is also a super-genius. A Fantastic Family of Five, if you will. Note this is not like The Incredibles, their powers are unrelated to their predicaments.
Due to climate change, the only chance humanity has is colonising other planets (but in a public NASA way, before Elon ruined these ideas). For some reason, the mission requires 10 years of cryosleep and the entire family will go along with the workaholic father.
Besides the workaholic but loving father, there’s also the 50’s mum (who is also a brilliant biologist), the little brat kid (a brilliant roboticist), the eldest daughter (a brilliant medical doctor), and the teenage daughter (the artiste, but also a brilliant computer genius).
Like Contact, there’s a terrorist faction trying to blow up the ship, and they are even referred to as “West-hating bigots” or something 50’s like that. Their pilot is murdered, to some hotshot fighter pilot takes his place. As soon as he sees a piece of ass, he goes for it, even though she’s the daughter of the boss who is right there besides him. She is more than a match for him, several times, splashing him with water after he propositions in a most brusque way.
There’s a mole inside NASA, he breaks in and reprograms the robot to kill them after a while, but he gets stuck in the ship. They succeed in pushing them off course into the Sun, but they escape by warp speeding into a random place in the universe.
The mole is also a doctor, but also a former soldier, you can see where his wickedness comes from. The good pilot is the one subordinate to civilian control, he gets a bollocking for countermanding orders. The bad military dude incites a coup.
I’m pretty sure this the setup for the TV show, but they only have time for two missions here, all time travel related. First they reach their own rescue mission in the future, and it’s a light version of Event Horizon. The climax is a more convoluted story where they find and loot their own ship in the future, complete with headstone of the crew and all.
Ironically, Jared Harris plays the elder kid, a nepo baby through and through. That’s how you know the parental stuff is “real”.
This the source of “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!” robot scream, the one with the rotating light in a glass dome. I think it’s on the background in Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.