Steven Dimeo
With $20 million at its disposal, Walt Disney productions - thanks to a Mickey Mouse storyline, cartoon characters and other broadly unoriginal strokes - succeeds only in flushing THE BLACK HOLE and its stunningly accomplished pyrotechnics right down its own drain.
Despite producer Ron Miller's intention to appeal to a mass audience by, among other things, featuring "name" actors, this all-out venture into SF adventure warrants the first "PG" ever for a Disney film only if the letters stand for "Paid Good," what studio executives must have done to get such a rating with a childish plot void of expletives, brutality, sex or anything else that could make it the least bit interesting. Except for the lavish special effects, THE BLACK HOLE is just another LOST IN SPACE for kids - only without that TV series' saving self-mockery which this one desperately needs.
The space probe Palomino just happens to nose in on an enormous black hole, nearby which the crew finds willingly suspended in disbelief the Cygnus, a spaceship long thought lost. The Palomino team of two pilots, two scientists and a reporter docks to find the Cygnus helmed by the only human survivor, scientist Hans Reinhardt (played by Maximilian Schell), who commands an army of personal robots constructed in his spare time over the last 20 years. Why he waits that long to enter the black hole only with the Palomino crew members on board to harass and thwart him is a question deftly left unanswered.
Screenwriters Gerry Day and Jeb Rosebrook introduce some suspense in the beginning by showing us a strange "robot" funeral and a humanoid robot with a limp. But the only mystery is too quickly exposed once they unmask Schell as the looney-tune archvillan that he is, so they can get on with pouring robots and humans alike down the black hole which, all too appropriately, is the sole point of the film anyway.
However, as a superficial action film, THE BLACK HOLE sucks us only into a cornucopia of corn where coincidence and contrivance are the only true sources of energy. Allusions to Dante's "Inferno" or the David and Goliath legend hardly qualify as the literary affections that might have at least elevated the script nine levels of hell below the beautific perfection of the special effects. But from the opening sequences that yank the Palomino to the Cygnus and the black hole, to the comic book conflict between Schell and the Palomino crew, events keep growing Pinnochio-like out of every writing peccadillo possible, perpetrated just to keep something happening on the screen.
Randomly sprinkled throughout are epigrammic cliches parading as comic relief, voiced with remarkably unfunny results bu the levitating robot Vincent. To a gaping Joseph Bottoms, who holds down the fort while the rest of the posse forges ahead, Vincent says, "They also serve who only stand and wait." And he remarks to his clanking companion, after a rival robot he defeats throws a self-destructing temper tantrum, "If there's anything I hate it's a sore loser."
Once the struggle between the victorious intruders and Schell's robots is too easily resolved, the writers have the gall to make a swarm of meteors crash in out of the blue screen just to keep the survivors (and the audience) awake. Plot obviously plays second fiddle as the disaster effects team makes another Rome burn.
The screenwriters know even less about science fiction than about literate science fiction cinema. Even with ex-astronaut Gordon Cooper as the technical advisor, the script neither clarifies nor exploits the theoretical possibilities of a phenomenon like a black hole. Rosebrook and Day have apparently named the space ship "Cygnus" as a curiously obscure reference to one of the primary candidates today for a real black hole, the Cygnus X-1 binary star system. But why didn't they place the story there? And rather than having the Palomino stumble onto such a significant phenomenon in its futile search for life, why not make its very purpose an exploration of that hole? That would have established at the outset the more original man vs. nature conflict - whether the crew members can avoid falling in and what might happen once they do.
In one scene Schell mentions something about "angular momentum" being the force he has harnessed. No one ever explains that an orbiting object skimming close to the Schwarzchild limit (or "event horizon," beyond which nothing inside the hole can be detected outside) can convert 30 percent of its mass into useable energy from the slingshot effect. Likewise, the wide-eyed scientist Alex Durant (played with characteristic nervousness by Anthony Perkins) alludes to the "Einstein bridge" (also called the Einstein-Rosen bridge), but never explains the key to making any sense out of the muddled ending. The massive time-space distortion of a collapsed star could theoretically create a bridge or "wormhole" through which matter could be teleported to other universes or locations light years away in the same universe, the energy subsequently reemerging didn't know how to introduce such exposition without slowing down the action - even the most fundamental definition of a black hole, a totally collapsed star whose mammoth gravitational pull won't even let light out of its grasp, is never offered. But the science is as essential as a credible plot to provide a meaningful basis to the world conjured up by the visual technicians.
The strained mechanics of the plot could have been rescued by sympathetic characterizations, but everyone - even the robots - remain nothing more than black and white stereotypes. Maximilian Schell as the Mad German Scientist is the most humiliating example. Though Schell (under the flaccid direction of Gary Nelson, who also helmed FREAKY FRIDAY and WASHINGTON: BEHIND CLOSED DOORS) is still the best actor in the bunch here, he's teamed with a Frankenstein monster named Maximilian and, if that's not enough, a platoon of goosestepping robots yet. His dialog may have moments of humanity, as when he confesses about the armor-like appearance of his robots, "They're a bit medieval, but I'm a romantic." But we never learn anything specific about his life that would let us identify with him. When Schell becomes his own lead robot on entering the black hole, the cinematography may be as awesome as the set itself, but the implications are as subtle as a supernova. That touch alone would dispel any notion the filmmakers might have entertained that THE BLACK HOLE could be anything else but another Disney kiddie flick.
The robots are further proof of the marionette mentality. Only a kiddie matinee could get away with the whiny, unrobotic voice of Roddy McDowell as Vincent or Slim Pickens as his beat-up cohort, Old Bob. Both tin dizzies even suffer the further indignity of "eyes" taken from Disney's own Goofy. And where but in a Disney movie could these two emotional robots execute an entire army of more powerful and inexplicably - but thankfully - quieter robots, themselves condemned because they are too emotional, with such ease just because they are Good?
The scene of Vincent competing with Schell's star pupil Captain Star in a game of computer skeet shooting is equally childish. Why, after all, would machines invented to serve man ever need recreation themselves?
For a while it looks like our only hope for "adult" entertainment is the casting of Yvette Mimieux as telepathic scientist Kate McCrae, whose father served on the Cygnus. Forget the writers' too-visible suspension wires again when they endow her with ESP so she can later contact a non-sentient mechanical being as her only means of salvation from the evil clutches of the Nazified nut Reinhardt. Though she is much weatherbeaten since her debut 20 years ago as the innocent Weena in George Pal's production of THE TIME MACHINE, Mimieux is still attractive and even the creators of ALIEN realized that a women's libber like Sigourney Weaver's character has other assets she can still display in the end. So why insert such a blah character as Mimieux depicts if she isn't going to take off her clothes? The most risque thin she does is reach out for the hand of Captain Holland (Robert Forster) as their phallic vehicle breaks into the black hole. Only in a (sigh) Disney movie.
What finally makes this movie so infantile is its unabashed unoriginality. As impressive as the scene may be with Schell treating his guests to dinner in an ornate, Victorian setting, the slowly circling accretion disc of the black hole as a contrasting backdrop through the windows behind, it's more than just a little reminiscent of a similar scene in Captain Nemo's Nautilus from 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, Disney's only justifiable SF classic to date. The rest seems as much a flagrant rip-off of STAR WARS as BATTLESTAR GALACTICA was - from the escape across the bridge inside the Cygnus (remember Luke and Leia doing that Errol Flynn away from the Stormtroopers?), to the hackneyed and shamelessly maudlin exchanges between Vincent and a "dying" Old Bob (R2D2 they are not), to the John Barry score, particularly when Vincent and Maximilian battle it out with predictable results (Barry should have stuck with James Bond - the music at this point sounds precisely like the theme from STAR WARS!). Even the silliness of a fiery hell for the Bad Guy and cathedral arches for the Good Guys as they pass through the black hole cannot hide the filmmakers' vain effort to imitate the stargate climax of Stanley Kuberick's seminal work in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
Of course, the puerile script, hollow characters and Xerox quality of the film cannot diminish the astonishingly grandiose special effects, the swan song of retiring Peter Ellenshaw, whose career as a matte artist spans more than four decades, from THINGS TO COME and including his Oscar-winning work for MARY POPPINS. His gothic industrial design for the Cygnus is as imaginative in its own way as surrealist H.R. Giger's touch was in ALIEN. The overall convincingly futuristic sets, the crisp integration of live action with a record 150 matte paintings and a computerized motion-control camera system that enhances the realism rivals even STAR WARS and may well net Ellenshaw another much deserved statuette.
But can such beauty transcend the stupidity of a giant meteor rumbling down the center of the Cygnus without immediately blowing the Good Guys to kingdom come from the sudden decompression? Can it make us forget the crumpled aluminum foil over Ms. Mimieux's head before she is saved (in the nick of time, naturally) from becoming another of Schell's bionic, lobotomized zombies? Can it defy the missed opportunities of what could have been cinematically portrayed at the rim of the black hole - the appearance of a body or ship seen frozen for an eternity at the ergosphere (a kind of metaphorical glass plate above the event horizon), the possible forays into endless extradimensional fantasies other than a dumb hell for Schell or glassy white epiphanies for all but the self-serving journalist miserably acted by Ernest Borgnine?
For that, after all, is the bottom line to the pit: the whole can only be the sum of its parts. What SF films like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, SUPERMAN and METEOR should have told even callous filmmakers out for a fast buck is that no amount of money poured into special effects (and fully half the budget of THE BLACK HOLE went to Ellenshaw's team) can save a script so full of other holes. However moodily mesmerizing some of the shots are in Francis Ford Coppola's own multi-million dollar extravaganza APOCALYPSE NOW, the camera-stopping conceptions cannot prevent the tenuous Vietnam war story from being an apocalyptic bore. Clearly Disney is not the only studio that should begin reexamining priorities. If the trend toward big-budget SF goes the way of Biblical epics as it most certainly will, it won't be for lack of sophisticated technical breakthroughs in cinematic magic but rather for lack of sophistication in the vehicle they embellish.
Except for STAR WARS, which never pretended to be more than old-fashioned fantasy with new-fashioned hardware, science fiction has still not matched the blend of story and special effects that made FORBIDDEN PLANET a classic over 20 years ago, and fantasy films have still never approached the timeless fusion in THE WIZARD OF OZ just 40 years ago. Next time out, Hollywood would do well to hire writers who have learned a little something over the past 20 years about science, science fiction and fantasy, the standards of classic literature and quality cinema.
Copyright © 1980 Frederick S. Clark
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