Danger! Danger!

Hiding behind a slatted door, young Will Robinson fiddles with a holographic zapper aimed at his school principal. As she harangues the boy’s mother about his obstreperous behavior, Will morphs the matronly principal into a gun-toting Rambo in sensible shoes. Maureen Robinson bursts out laughing. The mortified principal stalks out and Maureen turns back to steeling her reluctant children for a separation anxiety no child-rearing guide could prepare her for--a 10-year jaunt around the universe in search of a way to rescue the Earth.

“Saving the planet; gimme a break,” snorts 10-year-old Will.

“Lost in Space,” the campy ‘60s television series, has been spectacularly hijacked for a wise and wisecracking cinematic parable of family dynamics, a morality tale hatched under the long metaphoric shadow of that other Spock, Benjamin.

Instead of a contest to select the best go-go girl in the galaxy--one of the series’ fluffier episodes--the film revolves around such weighty themes as the absent father and the problems of parenting a million miles from home. The film pits the fatally distracted William Hurt against a volatile Gary Oldman--an embittered character so evil even his goatee quivers with demonic intent.

Not that the film isn’t a science-fiction extravaganza with a vengeance. It is so full of special effects that it is taking a marathon five months to shoot and is currently sprawled across 11 sound stages at Shepperton Studios in the leafy suburbs of London.

With cuddly and creepy creatures by Jim Henson’s workshop, yawning canyons of extraterrestrial sets by Norman Garwood (the fevered imagination behind “Brazil”), time warp portals and hundreds of other computer graphics, New Line Cinema is betting it will get its $70 million worth. The film, New Line’s most expensive venture to date, is due for release next spring.

Even NASA has gotten in on the act, called in for story consultations on the look of the future and predictions about family stress in outer space. The studio is gambling that the film will become a franchise, spinning off Robbie the Robot toys and evil Dr. Smith masks.

Says Oldman at the prospect of becoming an action figure: “I’m not bothered because it’s an intelligent script. It’s not just a shoot-’em-up, let’s cram in all the special effects we can and razzle-dazzle ‘em with laser guns.”

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Director Stephen Hopkins, however, was less than thrilled at his first read-through of the script. “My initial reaction was: Oh, no, please don’t make me. You can spend as much money as you like; it’s impossible to make this film,” he recalls over lunch in the studio commissary. “If there’s not some crazy computer effect to consider, there are robots wandering around, puppets jumping up and down, TV monitors distorting things, giant moving walls in spaceships, time portals, hyper-gates and hyper-speed.”

Hopkins, who honed his special effects skills on such horror films as “Predator 2” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 5,” was just coming off a “thoroughly miserable experience” with the star-crossed African epic “The Ghost and the Darkness.”

“Lost in Space” screenwriter and producer Akiva Goldsman (“Batman Forever,” “Batman & Robin”) persuaded him that the film was more concerned with the confrontation between a father and his son than with giant man-eating spiders and other sci-fi staples.

“I use science fiction to have the story sneak up on audiences and catch them off-guard with more content than they might have imagined,” Goldsman says during the shooting.

Originally, New Line envisaged a wackier, inflated version of the already-wacky television series. Goldsman, Hopkins and Richard Saperstein, the studio’s executive vice president, finally cajoled New Line President Bob Shaye into risking a darker film and casting Hurt, Oldman and Mimi Rogers--intensely nuanced actors not known for their wackiness or likely to stand still as foils for an epic of special effects.

Despite its visual fireworks, “Lost in Space” is no “Star Wars” redux, even though both films are driven by the search for a father’s affection. Where Darth Vader is encased in emotional and technological invincibility, Hurt’s John Robinson is vincible to a fault. He bumbles through fatherhood on auto-pilot--more a creature of baffled guilt than a Vader-esque black hole of imperious threat. “Professor Robinson is so serious and such a horrible father, he comes across as funny,” Hopkins says with a laugh.

For the analytical Hurt, the role is as form-fitted as his rubbery black spacesuit. “To save his family, which means saving his race, he has to do the work that takes him away from them,” the actor explains during a break. “That’s what’s tearing at him. He’s robbing them of the thing they could use the most.”

Like the TV series, the film launches the Robinsons into space in search of a habitable planet after mankind has wrought irreparable environmental havoc on Earth. In this endangered 22nd century world, the inhabitants live under “comfort domes” to escape the perpetually wet weather of the rapidly deteriorating atmosphere.

Cynically scoffing at the Robinsons’ planetary rescue mission, Maj. Don West, a lone wolf hotshot flight commander played by Matt LeBlanc of “Friends,” parrots the accepted line: “Every schoolchild knows that our recycling technologies will cure the environment; this mission is just a publicity stunt to sell soda.”

“Every schoolchild has been lied to,” Robinson responds in grim earnest. “Our recycling technologies came too late. All fossil fuels are virtually exhausted. The ozone layer is down to 40%. In two decades, the Earth will be unable to support human life.”

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Piloted by West, the Robinsons set off across the universe, encountering voracious spiders, benign lizard-monkeys with saucer eyes, a hostile planet where time waves swallow everyone without warning, and--after several swift kicks of self-awareness--the means to their own tenuous salvation.

Unlike the chirpy ‘60s family, these Robinsons are edgily dysfunctional. Purist fans of Irwin Allen’s original series may be in for a jolt. Reruns keep the flame alive on the Sci-Fi Channel and series’ clubs around the world keep in touch via half-a-dozen sites on the Internet.

“June Lockhart, the original Maureen Robinson, always seemed to be making lunch,” jokes Mimi Rogers. In this updated version, the doting homemaker has undergone a post-feminist make-over. Maureen is now a no-nonsense bioengineering genius. She’s also a portrait in exasperation, obliged to contend with her teenage daughter Penny’s budding Electra complex and her husband’s abstracted fumbling of paternal affection.

Rogers, who worked alongside high-powered British research biologists for a couple of days to prepare for her role, has some of the punchiest lines in the script. Lockhart would never have gotten away with dressing down her husband and the spaceship’s pilot the way Rogers does when she barks to the posturing pair: “Now if you’ve finished hosing down the decks with testosterone, I suggest you come with me.”

Despite being a science-fiction buff and card-carrying Trekkie, Rogers was dubious about the project at the outset. She quickly realized that Maureen is “not just some cardboard space babe,” but the emotional center of the film, as tough as the men, but with a cooler head.

For Hurt, the film is a chance to pick up where the series left off, to reconsider meaty themes like family versus technology and artificial intelligence versus natural intelligence that were smuggled into the otherwise lightweight television episodes only to abruptly fizzle out.

“Even as a kid, I remember saying, ‘Jeez, I wish the producers would develop these ideas more,’ ” says the actor.

“Even though this is a glorioski space movie, it deals with some of these same heavyweight issues that first caught my attention, only in simplified form. This is a family racing against technology, trying to use technology to beat it. The very technique they’re using to escape the Earth’s demise is taking the problem with them, in the same way that the idealist gets off ‘The Mayflower’ and the rats are swarming at his heels.”

One of those rats is Dr. Smith, a role that allows Oldman to tap unexpected comic reserves as he digs deep into his bag of quirky villainous mannerisms.

He was drawn to this movie by his fascination with “the rage tearing away at the Robinson family,” he says. “It’s the emotional well I draw on for all my work.”

Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Smith sets out to wreck the family he doesn’t have. But where Richard III woos the widow of the king he’s just killed, Dr. Smith, now mutated into a human spider, settles for the boy Will. By becoming a surrogate father, Smith simultaneously wreaks revenge on John Robinson and forces him to face up to the paternal responsibilities he’s been escaping.

“This is Smith’s higher dramatic function within the film, what saves him from being just one broad brush stroke of villainy,” the actor maintains.

The Freudian-Oprah overlay--what the director calls “those wonderful family-father issues”--might’ve sunk the film into treacly caricature. But the filmmakers have sought to pull it back from the edge with Goldsman’s understated dialogue and Hopkins’ insistence on a low-key naturalism--even if filming occasionally has resembled group therapy.

“Some days, you could almost feel the catharsis crackle,” jokes Hopkins, who only recently reconciled with his own father after 17 years of not speaking.

“When we shot the confrontation scene between Will and his father, every guy was going, ‘Yeah, tell him,’ me included,” the director recalls. “We’ve all had a time when we wanted to be the same age as our parents, to stand up and fight back, to plead for them to listen to what we’re saying and stop treating us like idiots.”

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On the bridge of “Jupiter One,” the mother spaceship, the Robinsons are saying goodbye to one another before entering cocoon-like “sleep tubes” and blasting off into the unknown for a decade of travel in “cryosleep mode.” Sheathed in a black rubber spacesuit with flashing blue lights, Rogers’ Maureen Robinson adjusts a strand of her daughter’s hair. Lacey Chabert, of Fox’s “Party of Five” television series, plays 13-year-old Penny Robinson.

“Don’t, Mom! Vogue says this will be the style,” she pleads, waiting a beat. “In 10 years,” she adds in her final petulant dig before takeoff. Rogers glares at her, and Penny shuffles obediently into her tube.

“Can we cut back on her oxygen a little so that she’s not quite so annoying when she wakes up?” zings Will, played by Jack Johnson, from his sleep tube.

Hurt’s John Robinson lumbers up to whisper something in Penny’s ear that makes her smile, then turns to Will, fumbling a hopelessly awkward hug.

“You get a C in paternal expression, Professor, but an A for effort,” Maureen comments with wry fondness. Shameless teasing and loving irony are handed down in this bunch like family heirlooms.

Musing earlier over his swordfish, Hopkins speculated about NASA’s motives in drawing up plans to send family missions into deep space. “It may be the only way people can live together for protracted periods without killing one another,” he says with a bemused grin.