I was wandering through that depths of the internet earlier this week when I stumbled on to a preview for some weird, new Disney sci-fi “epic” called Star Wars. Never heard of it, but with all the robots and lasers I imagine it some sort of hipster attempt at a space drama that’ll never go anywhere.
Whatever, Disney; we all know it’s just you guys trying to revive a classic franchise.
And that franchise is Disney’s own 1979 classic The Black Hole.
The Black Hole revolves around the crew of the USS Palomino is returning to Earth some time ago in a star cluster super-far away.
Captain Dan Holland (Robert Forster), First Officer Lieutenant Charlie Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), journalist Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine), ESP-sensitive scientist Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux), the expedition’s civilian leader Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins) and the robot V.I.N.CENT (“Vital Information Necessary CENTralized” – voiced by Roddy McDowall).
They come across a spaceship near a black hole that appears to be a lost vessel: USS Cygnus. Oh, and get this; it was the same ship McCrae’s father was on when it disappeared.
More importantly, get this!
This movie has Robert Forster, Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins AND Roddy McDowall!
When the sweetest cast this side of Corsica gets on board the Cygnus, they find the only living member of its crew – Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) and his crew of creepy robots led by the android Maximilian. Reinhardt gives some excuse that there was a meteor shower and the rest of the crew escaped to earth while he and McCrae’s father stayed on to study the black hole. Later, after McCrae’s father passed away, Reinhardt built the robots to aid in the research.
Spoiler alert! They aren’t really robots and Reinhardt is a bad guy.
I mean, you could pretty much see this one coming considering that he is played by Maximilian Schell – a talented actor who spent most his life playing Nazis…
Anyway, the movie moves along in typical Disney fashion – not too much outside the box save for some swearing (damn and hell were unheard of before that time). However, once you get to the end you mind is kind of blown.
Basically, the crew is taken into the black hole where there’s all sorts of weird heaven and hell references, merging of man and machine, past present and future… it’s like Stanley Kubrick decided to write an episode of Battlestar Galactica while really, really drunk.
In my opinion, The Black Hole was one of Disney’s last, desperate attempts to scratch the car door of where the Sci-Fi trend was going in the late-70s early-80s (A previous effort, The Cat From Outer Space didn’t quite hit the mark).
Although quite a few things were invented because of the film (the most famous being the Mattescan system, which enabled the camera to move over a matte painting), it really was a futile attempt. The dialogue was atrocious, the story falls completely off its wheels, and horribly inaccurate science.
So good luck, Star Wars; you have HUGE shoes to fill if you’re trying to revive The Black Hole.
Until next time!
