THE BLACK HOLE
Needs a soundtrack from Gamma Ray

  Hey, any Gamma Ray fans here?  Danny, I know you're a fan.  Anyway, they do a song called "Beyond The Black Hole", about flying right into a black hole.  It contains the line "Don't wait for me, 'cuz I won't come back."  Yikes, he ain't kidding!

One of the more glaring Star Wars knockoffs to be churned out around 1979 or so was The Black Hole, which was also (along with, years later, The Black Cauldron) one of Disney's then-abortive baby steps towards attracting an older audience.  (since then, to facilitate this, they just got themselves another studio to lord over) In this case, that older audience would be about the eight-to-twelve demographic, but its nasty (offscreen) violence, "What the Hell?" ending seems almost intended for adults.  Whatever; The Black hole is, for most of its running length, precisely the kind of mindless-crossing-over-into-stupid (think Armageddon with even more hilariously bad physics) jumble of cash-in-on-this-quick ideas you'd expect.  Somehow, the mess managed to moderately entertain me, however, and it was nice to revisit one of the many movies I loved as a member of that target audience that I know I couldn't give a rat's ass about today.  (half of my family has been making half-hearted plans to revisit a bunch of these movies; Clash Of The Titans, Spacehunter; Adventures In The Forbidden Zone, even Time Bandits, though I doubt that last one really belongs on such a list)

The crew of the Palomino, a deep-space research/exploration vessel, is in deep shit.  For starters, their mission ("To discover habitable life in outer space") sounds very unclear.  Then, they fail to detect the most massive black hole on record until they're almost on top of it.  Then, getting a little too close, their ship conks out and has to be rescued by the Cygnus, a massive starship which disappeared with its possibly mad creator Dr. Reinhardt (Maximillian Schell) twenty years ago.  One Palomino crew member, who can psychically communicate with the shipboard robot, had her father on that ship, but when they get aboard, she's out of luck; the only human crew member is Reinhardt, and everybody else on board is a robot, headed up by the demonic-looking Maximillian.  The Palominoans have interrupted Reinhardt's grand scheme: to take his ship into the black hole to see what there is to see.  Anyway, with a setup like that, you'd better believe SOMEBODY goes into that black hole, and what they see in there probably isn't what you'd expect.

This movie doesn't do a lot of explaining of just what black holes are, so if you don't know, don't expect this to enlighten you.  Here's my not-exactly-Stephen-Hawking definition: a black hole is what happens when a star is so massive that its own gravitational attraction causes it to collapse in on itself, past the point where atoms start cramming up against each other, past the point where atoms collapse in on themselves, until all of its matter is compressed into an infinitely small point in space; you can't get any smaller than that.  They call it a black hole because, at least within the clouds of gases swirling on down toward it, it looks like a big sphere of total darkness, because even light is sucked in by the gravity.  The "surface" of that sphere is called the event horizon; that's the distance out from the hole from which nothing can escape.  Wherever you are relative to a black hole, lemme tell you the direction the hole's in is called "down". 

Now, the possibility of a journey into the event horizon of a black hole might seem suicidal on the surface; after all, you'd be compressed down WAY smaller than Mini-Me.  But that's when things get funky; inside the event horizon (even just getting close, astronomically speaking), time and space start behaving all wacky, so maybe there's a "journey" of sorts possible after all.  I don't want to find out firsthand until there's a big stack of satisfied customers who did it before me.

So, you can see the potential for some fairly thought-provoking sci-fi adventure here.  And maybe that's how The Black Hole started out, I don't know, but what it ends up as is a lead-footed Star Wars knockoff with some neat ideas and great visuals which keeps, well, collapsing in on itself with its silly attempts at satisfying/pacifying a wider and younger audience.

The human cast are all kind of without identity; there are capable actors here (Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux, Joseph Bottoms) but with nothing to work with, they just kind of sit there, and are at times hard to tell apart, no matter how familiar you are with them.  Schell hams it up nicely, however.  The filmmakers obviously tried to give the robots the most personality; too bad that didn't work.

C3PO and R2D2 are combined into VINCENT (voiced by Roddy McDowell, and looking more like a mobile garbage can than R2 ever did), which doesn't really work; the two droids were a comedy team first and foremost, and to combine them into one being was a bad decision.  VINCENT, despite McDowell's efforts, ends up with the worst traits of both: he's a cutsie-pie nag (who, worse yet, has his dialogue largely limited to irritating cliched metaphors).  He's got these huge eyes which are expressive, I guess, but you'll wish they weren't.  He meets a beat-up earlier model of himself, BOB (voice of Slim Pickens), who basically acts scared all the time. (you can tell he's scared because his own huge eyes are kinda slanted outward)

The attempted scene-stealer is Maximillian (maybe that should be MAXIMILLIAN), who sure is the cool sight to behold - for a little while.  Made out of red metal with a single glowing horizontal eye slit (pointed up at the ends), he's suitably demonic and imposing.  But not much is done with him; he cannot speak, and the only parts of him which actually move are his head (which swivels around) and two arms which pop up and can only point straight ahead.  He can float around, but how much of a menace can you be if all you can do is pop up your arms use them as drills/propellers against, I guess, only opponents who refuse to step to the side a bit?

The story here is silly as all hell; loss of atmosphere due to hull breach is treated much like gravity was in Armageddon; haphazardly, to say the least.  Sentry droids - this movie's answer to Imperial stormtroopers - are the worst shots I've ever seen (at least the Trade Federation droids managed to blow up a shield generator or two), making for some incredibly lame shootouts.  I still can't get over that ship's stated mission.  Reinhardt claims to have developed anti-gravity - so if he's shielded from the radiation, zipping on in to that event horizon and back shouldn't be all that tough, should it?  Not in this movie; anti-gravity is only used to keep the Cygnus at a standstill relative to the black hole.

Story-wise, it's the end to this movie that's most memorable, even if it doesn't make sense, or maybe it does, hell if I know.  Maybe the filmmakers were going for a 2001 thing here, and kudos to them if they were, since it's nice to see an influence other than Star Wars at work here.  I remember seeing this with the rest of my elementary school, many years ago; I'd already seen it at the time, but not a lot of the others had, and at that ending, all the kids (however confused) said "Coooooool!" and the teachers just kinda looked at each other wondering if they should've gotten something else.

I read the novelization to this (by Alan Dean Foster) a few months ago, hoping for some insight.  It was not illuminating.  There were a lot more throwaway references about how the black hole looks like something out of Dante's Inferno, but that's about it.  I was also hoping for confirmation of my long-held semi-memory that it was revealed late in the film that Maximillian is really the roboticized father of psychic-chick; I've heard from a couple of people who remember this as well, but can't find any confirmation of this anywhere.  Maybe we're all confusing this with the Luke/Vader thing.

Directed by Gary Nelson, The Black Hole is enjoyable if you're not asking for too much from it.  The ending is not the mindblower some have claimed, but it is pretty neat, and features as stirring a vision of just what it portrays as anything I've seen in the movies.  

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