THE BLACK HOLE - Does it suck?

There was a little movie you may have heard of that came out in the late seventies. I understand that it made quite a splash at the time. This obscure flick of which I speak is called Star Wars and apparently went on to make a little bit of money at the box office. In the resulting science fiction land rush, it seemed that everyone was coming out with a space opera or fantasy flick. Disney, of course wanted their share of that pie, resulting in their first PG flick (oh I remember the controversy surrounding that): The Black Hole.

Meet the crew of the SS Palomino, returning home from a deep space exploration mission. Under the command of Captain Dan Holland (Robert "Me and Pam Grier ripped off a million bucks from Samuel L Jackson" Forster), we have Lieutenant Charlie Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux), Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony "Oh god, mother! Blood!" Perkins), Harry Booth (Ernest "I ride shotgun on Airwolf" Borgnine), and a robot named V.I.N.CENT. (voiced by Roddy "Get yer paws off me you damn dirty ape" McDowall). As the ship cruses along uneventfully, they encounter one of the biggest black holes on record. More intriguing - they find a ship parked just on the edge of the enormous swirling mass.

Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the ship is the USS Cygnus, which was believed to have been lost in space some 20 years ago. The ship isn't quite as deserted as it seems when the lights suddenly come on, allowing the Palomino to land. There, they meet the only human on the ship - Doctor Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian "I'm not Max Von Sydow, but I try" Schell) and an army of robots. And of course as these things tend to go, Reinhardt is not just a scientist, but a MAD scientist intending on taking his ship into the black hole and beyond. Of course being a mad scientist, Reinhardt is up to all kinds of nefarious deeds in the pursuit of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know - and now the crew of the Palomino have to escape before they join Reinhardt on his potentially one way journey.

Oh, and Slim Pickins plays a robot. No, really.

Ok, so the story is essentially 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with robots, and the ending attempts to totally ape the metaphoric and trippy ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey but for kids - but it's not all that bad of a flick.

The brightest point of the movie is probably the look. The effects are really well done, with a combination of blue screen, miniatures and some good old fashion wire work. Even nearly thirty years on now, the matte paintings and black hole effects work look amazing. The set design is brilliantly futuristic and yet somehow seventies retro with long, sweeping corridors, high vaulted ceilings and a several levels high command tower with more a feeling of a Gothic cathedral than a bridge. And of course I'd be remiss if I didn&#146t mention exactly how mindblowingly cool Maximilian (the big red robot, and not the actor) is. While R2 and 3PO were great and had personality and I loved 'em as a kid - Maximilian was downright the most badass 'bot on the block. Come on - he had razor blades for hands!

The cast ranges from fair to adequate, with Maximilian Schell standing heads and shoulders above everyone else. His quietly psychotic obsessive Captain Nemo mad scientist could have been mustache twirling-ly over the top, but he makes it compelling and interesting and believable.

The other really strong point of the movie? The Music. While not quite as cool as John Williams and his work on - well, pretty much anything from the seventies: Superman, Close Encounters and of course Star Wars - John Barry's score, especially the overture and opening-credits music, is big and bold and brassy and does a ton for making the movie very atmospheric. It does tend to sound kind of Goldfinger-ish in places as Barry goes back to any one of his James Bond scores for some themes. And in the more action orientated scenes, Barry goes too bombastic - but for the most part, John holds his ground and delivers nicely.

Okay there are logical problems with the plot - running around in what would be the hard vacuum of space without any kind of protection, asteroids that glow orange, and a the ending shoots for the transcendental ending of 2001 with a whole bunch of surreal images, colors and sounds. Where Kubrick presented a metaphor for evolution (depending on how stoned you were at the time), the Black Hole goes for a metaphor of good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and devils all living beyond the event horizon.

Well, that or everyone actually did die at the end, crushed by the Black Hole. But that's a depressing end for what is essentially a kids movie. (Although I will point out that Reinhardt does pretty much get the depressing ending, spending an eternity of Man-on-Bot love with Maxililian in a homoerotic grasp in hell. Subtlety, thy name is Disney).

THE DVD -
There's a couple of versions of the Black Hole out on DVD. The one from 1999 is letterboxed, but not anamorphic. The second release from Anchor Bay is wide screen anamorphic (plus a pan and scan side of the disc as well). My copy is the earlier version, and looks really good. The picture is clear, vibrant, and sharp, and the 5.1 soundtrack was surprisingly robust.

I should warn you that one of the earliest pressings has a broken soundtrack. The front right channel is dead silent, making the soundtrack, in essence, a 4.1 surround. Finding one of these on the shelves is probably slim, but if you get the disc used, you might be in for a surprise.

THE EXTRAS -
What we get for extras is light years ahead of what we normal get for a back release from Disney (which is pretty much nothing), but we're still not exactly swimming in features. There's a short documentary that interviews matte-effects supervisor Harrison Ellenshaw going into detail about the special effects for the film Informative, but kind of dry. Then we get the really cool theatrical trailer, that also give you a look at how the bad the print could have looked.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
The Black Hole was Disney's first (and last) big budget science fiction flick with space opera trappings. Tron would come along a couple years later (and enjoy the same level of success as The Black Hole), but this was their only robots and lasers outing. The movie gets a lot of stick from people - and while it may not be the most sophisticated of stories - it is at least genuinely and consistently entertaining.