[Ezra]

A little background on The Black Hole: It was a project in development for about 10 years. When Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey became a success in 1968, Disney VP Ron Miller began looking for a Sci-Fi property to develop. But without Walt Disney's personal guidance, Walt Disney Productions was reluctant to commit to such big budget projects.

At the time, The Walt Disney Company had a lot of money tied up in "The Florida Project" that would eventually become Walt Disney World, and that left the movie arm of the company Walt Disney Productions on a short leash. President Card Walker, concerned about Disney's ability create the special effects required, and the expense of contracting it out to other companies, wasn't very keen on the project.

Actually, Walker needn't have worried. Disney would have been perfectly capable to create the required special effects in-house. In fact, several of Disney's special effects people had been on loan to MGM to work on 2001. Later on, those very same people would work on-loan for George Lucas' Star Wars, and some of them went on to form special effects contractor Industrial Light and Magic.

When George Lucas shopped Star Wars around Hollywood, the first studio he approached was Walt Disney Productions. Card Walker turned him down, again having expense concerns. Also, Walker knew that Ron Miller already had a space epic on the back burner, and would rather work on an in-house project than split the profit with an outsider.

At about that time, Miller had purchased the rights to an unpublished story titled Space Station One, about a densely populated space station in danger of being sucked into a black hole. In it's original treatment, It may have rivaled the Star Wars films. But still, Walker wouldn't commit. It was only after the initial Star Wars film was such a huge success that Miller's Sci-Fi project finally got the green light.

By that time, the project had been whittled down to it's bare bones. Space Station One became Probe One, populated by a small crew. The Vessel endangered by a black hole became a "ghost ship" populated by a lone captain and a silent crew of movie extras. It was The Incredible Shrinking Space Epic.

The final product, The Black Hole, was a day late and a dollar short. It had excellent production design and special effects, with over 550 visual effects shots, and more than 150 matte paintings, but shoddy post production work, resulting in visible wires in weightless scenes, poor matching of blue-screen work, and flat hollow-sounding dialog. Viewers expecting a grand spectacle of the final plunge into the black hole were dissapointed when met with an odd, somewhat abstract, neo-religious sequence instead.

Worst of all, the lead protagonists, Robert Forster and Yvette Mimieux turn in dull, wooden performances, making it difficult to care about about their predicament. It's a terrible mismatch to the lively performances turned in by Joseph Bottoms and Hollywood veterans Ernest Borgnine and Anthony Perkins. It's especially lacking when compared to the over-the-top scenery chewing turned in by Maximilian Schell. Even the robots V.I.N.CENT. (Vital Information Necessary CENTralized) voiced by Roddy McDowell and the silent but menacing Maximilian are more interesting than the leads.

I'm probably making it sound much worse than it is. Visually, in spite of all the gaffes, it looks fantastic. It just doesn't have the pace or pathos of the first three Star Wars films, or Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Despite the up-to-date special effects and production design, it comes off feeling more like 1960's The Time Machine. It's not a bad movie, it's just not a great one.