The SmarK DVD Rant for The Black Hole
It’s funny how childhood memories can cloud your recollection of certain movies. Case in point, this movie, which was released by Disney in 1979 as an answer to Star Wars and 2001, I’d guess, and featured a whole line of merchandising tie-ins, most of which I wanted. C’mon, everyone had the V.I.N.C.E.N.T. or Old B.O.B. figures!
Like Star Wars, fans have been waiting years for this one to be released on DVD. Sadly, after those years of waiting, it proves not to live up to the memories.
The Film
Much like 2001 and Star Wars, The Black Hole is a very ambitious film. However, unlike them, it doesn’t pay off the ambition with a good plot, or even an ending. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, but it’s obviously a film motivated more by special effects and the idea of building a movie around a black hole, rather than letting the movie flow from the story.
Set in some nebulous time in the future, The Black Hole picks up with a group of vaguely-military space explorers and their cute robot VINCENT stumbling across, what else, a black hole. It starts to suck them in, as they notice a ship basically orbiting the black hole, seemingly unaffected. Even better, it’s the assumed-dead ship Cygnus, which was lost years before when the mad scientist in charge defied government orders and made off with all hands. Needing repairs, they land on the floating station and discover that he’s still alive, along with some robot helpers, but everyone else from the crew is deader than Disney’s animation studio.
Now, from here you’d assume that it would turn into an outer space murder mystery along the lines of Alien3, with our heroes all dropping dead under mysterious circumstances, but this IS a Disney movie. Instead, they have dinner and talk, while VINCENT meets up with BOB, an older prototype of himself who’s seen better days, and has been made into the victim of target practice by the bigger, meaner robots.
The evil plan, which isn’t particularly evil on its face, is to take the giant floating station and traverse the black hole, finding out what’s on the other side. Sounds simple enough, but the square-jawed captain with veins of ice water wants to leave ASAP, and the slightly-weird egghead (played by the late Anthony Perkins with suitably creepy finesse) wants to stay. You’d think the solution would be easy — let him stay and get the hell out of Dodge before the ship goes through the black hole, but apparently there’s a duty to the country or something. The motivations for everyone are a bit murky, and not in the good way.
The movie is actually a striking counterpoint to Star Wars, because as Lucas notes on the new commentary track for his movie, Star Wars was the first mainstream movie to start with action, action, action instead of the slower, exposition-heavy buildup into the action that other sci-fi movies tended to favor. The Black Hole is the perfect example of that, spending the first hour teasing and building, and then turning into a big outer-space shoot-em-up in the last half hour, as the heroes plot to steal the ship away from the crazy scientist and his robot buddies, and of course rescue the helpless woman taken hostage in the process.
Unfortunately, once that is accomplished (and hopefully 25 years is long enough time after release to stop worrying about spoilers), there’s no ENDING. The heroes can’t logically escape because their ship is gone, and they’re presumably millions of light-years from home. Thus the writing has left the plot with only one direction for them to go after they get loose: The black hole. However, once there, there’s no satisfying payoff for all the promises of the movie. They go through, see a lightshow vaguely reminiscent of 2001 (although not so much so that LAWYERS need get involved”¦) and then emerge out the other side where an unnamed planet awaits. And don’t even get me started on where our villain winds up. What, then, was the POINT of the movie? Don’t go through black holes if you’re a bad person? Don’t reanimate your dead crew mates as mindless zombies?
I kind of hate harping on this movie because it was such a big part of my childhood and my fascination with sci-fi, but it just doesn’t GO anywhere. Not to mention that the hi-resolution medium that is DVD completely lays all the special effects trickery bare, from the wires on the robots to the blatantly obvious blue-screen backdrops in just about every scene. Not to mention the literally DOZENS of matte paintings that substitute for real sets. I’m not knocking them for doing the best they could with the limited budget they had, but it’s just so distracting to be taken out of the movie by ridiculously obvious wires. I think that, had it been made today, it could have been a much smoother transition from the relatively heady script to the screen, but back in 1979 CGI was still 3 years away from being realized and the story isn’t really strong enough to carry things on its own.
It’s an interesting movie from a nostalgic standpoint, but unlike TRON, the wonder and the technology involved in creating this one don’t stand the test of time. For fans only.
The Video
As noted, the hi-res of DVD exposes all the tricks of the trade in rapid fashion. While video quality is generally nice for on-set shots, when they’re standing in front of the blue screen things get grainy and fuzzy very quickly, and the contrast between the clean set shots and the special-effects shots is ugly and distracting. Not to mention the cheesy rear-projection effects during the transport sequences. Still, the majority of the movie cleaned up very nicely, some dust and grain aside, especially for a C-level release such as this.
The Audio
Redone in Dolby 5.1, there’s actually some nice surround usage for the laser fights and some good low-end during the meteor shower, and the dialogue is clear and easily understood. A nice job.
The Extras
As befitting a movie of this vintage, there’s not much here. You get an interesting 15-minute interview with the special effects guy from the movie, as he explains the process of creating the movie and talks about his original pitch for the ending, which would involve the Sistine Chapel of all things, and a 3-minute trailer for the movie that pretty much gives away the entire plot.
The Ratings
The Film: **1/2
The Video: ***
The Audio: ***
The Extras: *1/2
