Black Hole (1979)

Here's yet another childhood confession: growing up, my favorite piece of sci-fi visual entertainment wasn't Star Wars or anything associated with "Star Trek" (before you ask, "Doctor Who" was as of yet unknown to me), but The Black Hole, a movie whose only mark in film history is that it was the first PG film produced by Disney. The story finds the crew of a small exploratory ship, including the tough but intellectual Captain Dan Holland; Science Officer Kate McCrae, who besides being the token smart female has the ability to communicate telepathically with robots; a journalist coming along for the ride named Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine!)' young and mostly useless except for being pretty First Officer Charles Pizer' Dr. Alex Durant, who is played by Anthony Perkins on a low key' and V.I.C.T.O.R., a completely sentient robot who spouts philosophy from his tiny frame and looks a bit like the floating lava lamp-shaped killer robots with large cartoonish eyes from one of the old 8-bit "Mega Man" games. Fortunately, although The Black Hole was Disney's answer to the success of the Star Wars trilogy, V.I.C.T.O.R. isn't much like C-3PO, the Martin Lawrence of gay robots.

Anyway, the crew, while doing routine explorations, stumble across a black hole and a massive self-sustaining spaceship, the U.S.S. Cygnus, that was thought lost or destroyed years ago. The crew even finds an occupant, Dr. Reinhardt, who presides over a community of humanoid robots that wear reflective helmets along with black-armored soldier robots who do not in any way resemble imperial stor'troopers. At the top of the robot hierarchy is Maximilian, Reinhardt’s right-hand robot who is big, clunky, and red, so I imagine he represents Communism or some such. At the bottom is B.O.B., an outdated model from the same "breed" as V.I.C.T.O.R., but the latter befriends him anyway even though he talks in an annoying pre-John Wayne cowboy accent.

Naturally, the crew's early suspicions about Reinhardt, who acts as though he's in desperate need of someone to relieve his tension and waves away questions about what happened to the rest of the Cygnus' crew, prove to be justified. Eventually the crew learns that Reinhardt isn't just studying the black hole, he wants to travel through it (and, of course, live) to see if another dimension lies on the other side. Only Dr. Alex Durant seems to want to trespass on God's domain; everyone else wants to get off this crazy ship and are wondering why Reinhardt’s lackey robots seem human...

Looking back I think it was the way the film remained 'family-friendly' yet keep up a genuinely creepy tone through out most of it that impressed my childhood self. Seeing it again after a period of over thirteen years, I realize that, no, it's not a particularly good film - you don't have to be a psychic to know where this movie's generic and unambitious plot is going (one macabre twist, where we find out what's really going on with the humanoid robots our protagonists encounter, is so heavily hinted at that what might have been a shocking reveal is just kind of a big 'blah' moment). Also, for what's trying to be so hard to be a grave and ponderous film with nods to "serious" sci-fi flicks like 2001: A Space Odyssey, there's a lot of elements that belong more in a low-budget '50s sci-fi epic. We see characters floating around suitless in outer space with no ill effects, not even a little headache, and a woman is jerked out from the middle of what is implied to be a high-tech lobotomy (and I'm not talking about FOX's usual weekday line-up...*rimshot*) without being reduced to a drooling vegetable. Neither does the light-hearted action scenes and cartoonish robots go well with the strange, symbolic ending or lengthy, heady debates about when genius stops and lunacy begins.

Speaking of which, while all the acting runs from competent to quite good, Maximilian Schel as our insane scientist is the movie's highlight. Sure, his performance is a little cheesy and seems to have been a little too inspired by villains from Stan Lee-scripted comics, but there's just something endearing about his obsessed, hermit scientist and how he haughtily shrugs off the ethical concerns of our whitebread protagonists. Sadly, Anthony Perkins is pretty much wasted, but still pulls off the film's other noteable performance as a scientist tempted by the sheer thrill of discovery and is either motivated by pure love of discovery or by blind ambition...or, of course, both (his monlogue about how even death is an acceptable price for discovery and human progress is one of the film's best moments). Beyond that, the film is like many other live-action films produced by Disney in the period despite its *gasp* PG rating: light and vaguely memorable entertainment, although it has one of the stranger combination of influences you're likely to find in Disney's catalogue. Even as an adult, I still found it a fun film despite all (or maybe partially because) of its flaws.