For Murphy's doctor, talking to the animals is a guilty secret which he has to conceal, like a socially unacceptable illness or weird sexual peccadillo. Too agitated to go to bed with his wife, he heads straight for the doctor. But the experience brings him closer to his young, science- obsessed daughter (Kyla Platt), who also feels herself to be a "freak". However, when he begins to put these ideas into practice, his father attempts to forcibly suppress John's predilection by calling on the services of an exorcist and a dog- catcher.Years later, John is being played by Eddie Murphy, and his tendency reappears after he receives a knock on the head. "The guys in the dorm told me this thing wouldn't affect me!" he wails, finding himself berated by a guinea pig. We first meet John Dolittle as a three-year-old, being advised by his dog (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) that bum-sniffing is the key to true friendship. Goldsman is also responsible for the structural disasters that afflict the final third of the movie - which veers badly off course once it decides to dabble in matters such as time bubbles, temporal anomalies and hyperspatial wormholes.

Contemporary sci-fi can't get enough of this quantum jiggery-pokery, but its exponents rarely give the impression that they ever made it beyond the first five pages of A Brief History of Time. By the time the Robinsons have been marooned in an alternative future staffed by a nine-foot version of Gary Oldman in Jolson blackface and Richard III hump, Goldsman's plot has engineered its own entropic collapse.Betty Thomas's disappointingly unamusing Dr Dolittle (PG) relocates Hugh Lofting's books to modern-day San Francisco. There's a cute computer-generated space monkey who fulfils no function in the plot other than to pump up the merchandising potential. A sequence in which young Will Robinson (Jack Johnson) uses virtual-reality technology to exterminate a horde of scuttering alien arachnids will doubtless be available as a Doom-type shoot 'em up before the end of the week. He really shouldn't be taking parts as underwritten as this - unless, of course, he wants to spend the rest of his career stuck in roles that are somewhere between Abanazar and Tony Parsons.

("I just want you to know I love you, son" is one of the script's uglier outbursts.) Gary Oldman has been hired as Dr Smith for similar reasons - but he's badly let down by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who hasn't supplied a single line worthy of Oldman's capacity for sneering camp. William Hurt (in a fuzzy beard that makes him look like an illustration from The Joy of Sex) is interplanetary patriarch John Robinson, on hand to lend weight to the flimsy familial platitudes of the script. I got my copy two hours later (though I passed on the monkey).Oh, did I mention that there are some people in the movie, too? As Major West, the pilot, Matt LeBlanc plays the same part as he does in Friends, but in a rubber spacesuit. And just when you think the ads are over, Apollo FourForty's tub- thumping dance remix of the original TV theme blares over the film's closing credits, hypnotising you into buying the single. But Lost in Space is much more persuasive as an advert for this sexy aesthetic than it is as a coherent piece of film- making, and marketability is a stronger influence than logic over its events. The Robot still looks like it might contain a rack of nicely warmed plates, but otherwise, the film is a delicious exercise in techno-cool. Its designers have shaped a future from swooping curves and big chunky contours; ethereal glass domes, polished bronze transoms, and moulded, frictionless surfaces.

The Robinsons might be lost in space, but their interior decorators really know how to use it imaginatively. They can certainly come round and do up my flat. Visual seductiveness is both the pleasure and the problem of Hopkins's film. His work is brassy and bold, and some of his action set-pieces are breathlessly exciting. Lancome and Elizabeth Arden are available from major department stores.. IN THE PANTHEON of cult sci-fi, Lost in Space has a relatively lowly place, somewhere between Battlestar Galactica and The Clangers. The original Sixties TV series featured the dentally perfect, Bacofoil- wrapped space family Robinson, the sneakily effeminate Dr Zachary Smith and a robot (name of "Robot") which was was a hybrid of hostess trolley and a goldfish bowl.