Next up is sci-fi film, The Black Hole, Disney's first foray into intelligent science fiction aimed at kids, what were they thinking? It's not a good film and its going to be really hard for kids to actually understand the plot as it's not exactly the easiest film to understand. Check out my words after the jump...
Having
not seen The Black Hole since I was a small child I decided that now
would be a good time to revisit it. By now being a good time, I mean
that at the moment, I’m going through a Sci-fi phase and decided to
pull it off the shelf and give it a whirl. Boy was that a mistake,
now I'm all for cheap looking sci-fi flicks, Roger Corman did wonders
with films like Forbidden World and Battle Beyond The Stars but
fucking hell, The Black Hole looks quite cheap compared to those
films and this had a budget of $20,000,000. The floating robots have
stupid googly eyes and accents, nowt wrong the voices as they're done
by Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickings, but The Black Hole was trying to
be a serious science fiction film, black holes and shit. Let me try
and explain why I disliked this film. It has a good cast, Robert
Forster, Ernie Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, Maximillion Schell and
Yvette Mimieux, they do what they can with an under written script
with dialogue that would be totally lost on a younger audience. The
sets are alright with the main control bridge standing out as the
best of main sets and the matte paintings were quite good. So what
was my problem with the film?, well for starters the film was only 98
minutes long, that's an incredibly short period for a film that
pretends to take a look at black holes and the effects a black hole
has on the surrounding system, the main villain even mentions an
'Einstein-Rosen Bridge”, now how the fuck is a child gonna know
what that is, for people who don't know, it's a hypothetical shortcut
through space time, a wormhole, you know like you see in Star Trek.
Disney should never have attempted to make a smart science fiction
film for kids, it just didn't work and before you say what about
Tron, that didn't work either but now, Tron is seen more as
innovative than entertaining.
A
Group of astronauts receive a single coming from a near by Black
Hole, the discover that it's coming from a large ship just outside of
the hole's gravitational pull. It's the ship that one of the
astronaut's father was on. As the dock and enter the ship they
discover that the sole human on board is a crazy scientist who plans
on entering the black hole to see if there is anything beyond the
event horizon. It turns out that the scientist has turned the former
crew of the ship into automatons which leads them to believe that he
is indeed fucking mental. The lead doctor/scientist of the astronauts
decides he wants to join the crazy scientist on journey into the
black hole but then Weena from The Time Machine tells him about the
crew and he tries to escape and is killed by a robot, then they get
attacked by an asteroid shower which totally fucks up the ship which
causes a giant plasma screen to fall on top of the crazy scientist as
the astronaut's escape in some sort of shitty space ship. Then
something happens, can't say what it was because I don't fully
understand what was going on, and the astronauts end up going through
the black hole anyway. Then there's some really weird scene with a
robot standing on a giant rock with the automatons below it, I
haven't got the faintest idea of what the fuck that was all about,
2001 A Space Odyssey made more sense, then the astronaut's exits
through the black hole into the deepest reaches of space so they're
pretty fucked. Then it ends.
Absolute
drivel. From what i've read the theme behind the film is one about
God and The Universe but that really didn't come across to me. I
think the biggest problem with The Black Hole is how they basically
recycled the plot from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea which for the
time had already been done as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Disney,
luckily the realized the errors of their ways and their later Sci-Fi
efforts got a bit better.
The
best thing about the film is John Barry's score, Barry is a great
composer and his score for The Black Hole is actually quite beautiful
and features an Overture, which I read, Barry very rarely does.
Unfortunately The Black Hole is a bit of rubbish film but it's also a
curio, people should see this to see how one of the biggest film
studios in the world got it completely wrong. A lot of people refer
to it as a classic but I wouldn't, two other science fiction films
were made in 1979, Star Trek The Motion Picture and Alien, The latter
had a budget of $11,000,000 and that film looks absolutely
incredible. They should have tried to avoid replicating Star Wars and
tried something more original.
I'm
awarding The Black Hole 2 stars...
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