The Black Hole

[echoscot]

I know some of us have different opinions of this film. It is remarkable for many reasons. I am not a fan of the film, but as I lived through that moment of Disney history, I wanted to share my impressions of what happened. I know others like the film. Feel free to post any thoughts ideas.

Good:

1. Great cast
2. Great Special effects
3. Great cinematography
4. Great concept

So, you ask, why don't you like it? What happened?

The marketing for this film was huge. Disney recognized the importance of the sci-fi genre with the release of Star Wars a few years earlier. It was released the same year as Star Trek the Motion Picture, and the very next year everyone was anticipating the realease of The Empire Strikes Back.

I had the big poster on the wall, the soundtrack album, was excited that the next year I could finally be old enough to have my dream of working at WDW as a CM. I was really into this whole thing.

The movie came out and bombed......I went to see it and thought, it wasn't the worst thing I had ever seen, but it just didn't live up to the hype. There was some bad acting (That from a stellar cast), the dialogue got very corny in places. There were GREAT moments, when Maximillian the robot turns on his master. The giant meteor smashing through the ship. The discovery of what happened to the crew.

The problem was that they couldn't hold a cohesive story, and certain effects failed logically, the music budget got cut and frequently makes no sense with the action. At one point you can plainly see the metal rod suspending one of the robots that is supposed to be floating. The company ran into budget problems and failed to tap into the real potential that this film had.

That was a general problem with Walt Disney Productions in the late 70's and early 80's. This film plunged the studio into a financial black hole, from which it almost didn't emerge. Between this and a failed animation of The Black Cauldron(Which I personally enjoyed) morale plumetted. Stock plumetted. This led to the inevitable greenmail attempts by a man named Saul Steinberg and the eventual coup of Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, in 1984. As much as I don't care for Michael, that team did manage to turn things around, however I think the pendulum began to swing too far the other direction and I think we nearly killed the "goose that laid the golden egg".

So those are my thoughts. Any one else like it or dislike it or even see it? I know a couple of people had different thoughts in the Tron thread in a different forum. That's why I started this thread............

[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.

[echoscot]

Wow, that was great background, Ezra. That explains quite a bit. I knew about Lucas approaching Disney with Star Wars.

Like I said, not the worst ever, but definitely missed its potential by quite a mark. It could have sent the Company into the 80's with such strength that no one would have ever known who Michael Eisner was. If only...Ah the joys of an alternate universe. LOL