Lost in Space reboot a galaxy away from original

The art of the reboot is a curious science but if you can mix unfulfilled concepts with great imagination – or reimagination – then you can produce masterpieces from what began as artfully ambitious early works. What then do you make out of a show whose original episode inventory included "The Great Vegetable Rebellion"?

The first thing you probably do is turf what you know about Lost in Space out the window. Or down the hydro-drain of the Jupiter 2's galley sink. Some of what you remember of the original will come clawing its way back into the story but for the most part the silliest aspects are reduced here to space dust.

Lost in Space (Netflix, on demand, from April 13) aspires to take the original themes of its 1960s-era namesake – that is, interplanetary colonisation from an Earth that has become drained of many of its natural resources – and package it for a modern, home cinema-standard audience.

This isn't the first attempt to reboot Lost in Space, but it is the one that seems to stray the most from the original source material, and it is, interestingly, the one that makes the best fist of its lot. It's not an outright masterpiece but it's a solid showing for a series that has to pivot uneasily on a number of factors including seemingly plausible sci-fi and childhood memory.

The essence of the original is here: father John Robinson (Toby Stephens), wife and aerospace engineer, Maureen (Molly Parker) and kids Judy (Taylor Russell), Penny (Mina Sundwall) and Will (Maxwell Jenkins), the last of those best remembered by the original series robot, waving its dryer ducting arms about and wailing "Danger, Will Robinson!".

There are two tweaks here: the original series' dashing pilot Don West (Ignacio Serricchio) is rebooted as an outer space, Earth-born Han Solo and Dr Smith gets the gender bending treatment, pre-Doctor Who, with actor Parker Posey cast in the role of the villainous saboteur whose mission, seemingly, is to destroy the Jupiter colonisaton mission.

The family dynamics shift here with Judy and Penny closer in age, Will a little less brilliant than he was in the original, other ships are marooned with them – a Jupiter 3, Jupiter 4 and so on – perhaps the most radical departure from the original, and there is a robot which is not part of their mission, but rather an encountered piece of alien tech.

Stephens' John Robinson is unequivocally the centre piece of the narrative, but Posey's Dr Smith is immediately diverting, not just because the character – both here, and in its antecedent, played by Jonathan Harris – remains rich in mischief, but because Parker looks like she's so off the edge and having fun playing up to the role that it's compelling.

Mercifully, though, it is not camp. There are some awkward glitches in both premise and writing, not least how comfortably it sits in the framework of believable science. An audience can cope with a lot of science-stretching tricks in science fiction, but Lost in Space borrows from its forebear a curiosity for properly alien science, and encounters a few moments that stretch credulity instead.

The series also never quite manages to achieve clarity on what it's trying to say. Altered Carbon tips immediately into the relationship between wealth and technology, which Lost in Space half-hints at and then moves past. And while the action set pieces are properly cinematic, the audience for a high-end Netflix series, vegetable rebellions notwithstanding, might expect something more.