What’s it about?
After being bilked out of some lucrative intellectual property by a corporate bigwig, programmer Jeff Bridges sneaks back into his old office to find evidence of the theft. But while hacking the mainframe in search of proof, the Master Control Program -- an all-knowing sentient program that runs the company’s entire computer system (and then some) -- uses an experimental ray gun to trap Bridges inside the computer system itself.
Once inside, Bridges finds himself in a weird dystopian world patrolled by the Master Control Program’s jackbooted goons. But rather than put Bridges to death outright, he is instead forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial games against the personifications of renegade programs who refuse to renounce their belief in “the users” or submit to the Master Control Program. After escaping from one such game, Bridges sets out with a couple of free-thinking programs (including a digital warrior named Tron who was written specifically for the task) to take down the Master Control Program.
Is it any good?
Somehow I’ve never seen TRON before, so I knew from the start of this project that I’d certainly have to watch it. I’m not sure if it exactly counts as a classic, but if you tell folks that you’ve spent two years watching practically every science fiction movie worth seeing, then they’re going to expect that you’ve seen TRON. (Note: This blog will likely take me two years to finish, but one thing I’ve learned in the process is that it would take far longer than two years for me to watch every science fiction movie worth seeing.)
I’m not even sure what exactly I thought TRON was about before I saw it. I really ought to have written a little summary of my expectations before hand, but the truth is that I didn’t really think too much about what I’d be getting myself into. I knew it starred Jeff Bridges, and I knew it took place inside a computer, and I knew it involved something called “light cycles”. (I only knew this last fact because, many years ago, I used to spend hours playing an addictive freeware game called Tron Light Cycles against my brothers.)
I’ve spent many of this blog’s entries arguing why such-and-such fantasy movie really ought to be considered science fiction at heart. (Look no further than last week’s DARK CRYSTAL entry for an example.) So it’s with some hesitation that I find myself about to say that TRON is really a fantasy movie at heart. It’s not just that the insides of the computer as imagined by TRON bear no resemblance to the actual workings of a computer. But the explanation for computers that the movie comes up with is so primitive and so benighted that it boggles my mind. Let me try to explain what I mean.
When faced with the need to explain what goes on inside computers, the movie TRON tells us that there are little people inside that make them work. Again, a second time -- according to TRON, there are thousands of little people inside your computer right now, without whom the computer would no longer function. There’s a little man who runs your word processor, and a little man who runs your spreadsheet, and a little man who runs your solitaire game. This is the same explanation that ignorant and unsophisticated peoples came up with when they were confronted with inexplicable natural forces. There’s a big man who makes the lightning, a big man who makes the tides, and a big man who makes the west wind. That was all very well and good before the scientific method was invented, but we’ve moved considerably past that point by now. If THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) is a fantasy because it relies on Zeus and Hera and the rest of the gods to explain the workings of the natural world, then TRON is just as much a fantasy because it relies on little men to explain the workings of a calculating engine.
I understand that the world of TRON is meant to represent the virtual world of digital space -- that is, that the little men of the movie are not meant to be literally living inside the physical space of the computer. Instead, they are supposed to live in the computer’s memory, and everything we see is a fanciful representation of what’s going on in the memory. I get that. The problem is that this explanation doesn’t really make any logical sense either. Why would the virtual representation of a computer program have visible circuitry on its bodysuit? Why would they need to travel from point to point as if they were traversing physical space (something that happens in this movie A LOT)? What happens to the functions that the programs were supposed to control when they are terminated? Why is there a separate program that controls the input/output functions of all other programs? And so on.
I don’t really want to get into every nuance of how TRON blows my mind with its illogic and incuriosity about the details of computer science. Suffice to say that the world itself only intermittently makes sense if you take it as a representation of actual technology. I could be way off base here (and please let me know if I am), but the world of TRON is a fantasy world dressed up in a circuit-spangled bodysuit.
I haven’t forgotten that when I was writing about STAR WARS (1977), I spent a lot of time arguing that fantasies can still be called science fiction so long as they look like science fiction. In the case of STAR WARS, this means that the robots and spaceships qualify it for sci-fi status, even though the mystical forces at work and the importance of “destiny” and the general lack of interest in actual science are strong marks against it. But robots and spaceships have been common features of science fiction movies since the early 1900s. George Lucas clearly wanted STAR WARS to look like a sci-fi flick, no matter what else was going on in the story and themes, and so he used easily recognizable visual shorthand. It’s sort of like how you only really need Monument Valley, a ten-gallon hat, and a hoss to make a western. It doesn’t matter what the story is about -- if you put it in the right setting with the right costumes and props, it’s going to look like a western even if it violates every traditional theme of the genre. (Exhibit A for the defense: there are actually a handful of “Soviet westerns”.)
But I’m not sure if bodysuits painted with glowing circuitry are any kind of recognizable visual shorthand for science fiction. It’s certainly shorthand for “computer stuff”, but is dressing magical computer men in circuit-inspired outfits really any different than giving Bacchus a crown of grape leaves and a double chin? TRON doesn’t want to look like a science fiction movie necessarily -- it just wants to look like a fantasy computer world.
I obviously don’t think that the makers of TRON really believe that computers are really run by little men inside them. But I also don’t think that the ancient Greeks honestly believed that the sun was a chariot driven across the sky. Myths were partly a way of “explaining” things that couldn’t really be fathomed by ancient people, but the stories were really ways of passing on shared ideals and culture. That’s why many myths are still affecting today, even in a post-Enlightenment world when we should all know better. The fact that a myth may have involved, say, Poseidon and Vulcan didn’t necessarily mean that it was supposed to be regarded as proto-scientific commentary on the ocean and volcanoes. Likewise, I don’t see the computery setting of TRON as suggesting that it has any kind of commentary on computers or computer science. It is concerned with intellectual property rights, which is pretty prescient, but there's nothing about the world inside the computer that makes it fundamentally different from the real world. The program world has jobs, religious faiths, government, military -- but these things aren't set up in any particularly computery way. They are just translations of human institutions into a computer setting.
Anyway, I’ve done much more complaining about TRON than I expected I would. I enjoyed it okay, though the story is really just a run-of-the-mill dystopian pastiche. It definitely had its moments -- the gladiatorial bits were probably my favorites, and I was impressed that some of the games that Jeff Bridges was forced to play actually look like they could be fun computer games. (In the case of the light cycles, I can attest that this is definitely true.) The special effects are neat, but the world they depict has no logical underpinnings. So everything feels flat and empty. And this is no FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) where the characters go from lungs to heart to brain -- that is, to recognizable places that the audience might want to see. The only interesting "places" in TRON's computer world are an input/output tower and the nexus of the Master Control Program. But I don't know what an input/output tower is. Is it a program function? A piece of hardware? What keeps FANTASTIC VOYAGE interesting is that each destination depicts a real organ, and the nature of each results in distinct dangers and opportunities. In TRON, it all largely feels the same.
But look -- I’d be a hypocrite if I seriously asked you all to agree with me that TRON is a fantasy movie. It takes in place inside of a computer, and a computer is a science thing, so it’s science fiction -- no matter how else I might feel about it.
Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts
Monday, March 15, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
1979: THE BLACK HOLE
What’s it about?
A space expedition (including captain Robert Forster, scientists Yvette Mimieaux and Anthony Perkins, journalist Ernest Borgnine, and robot Roddy MacDowall) comes across an apparently derelict spaceship hovering around the opening of a massive black hole. They identify the ship as the Cygnus -- an exploration vessel that went missing decades ago with its entire crew. While investigating closer they are caught by the gravitational pull of the black hole, but are saved when the Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them to safety using a tractor beam.
On board the Cygnus, the explorers discover a ship populated by robots -- including a hulking red bruiser called Maximilian, mute shrouded types with reflective faceplates, and a beat-up old model voiced by Slim Pickens. They also find megalomaniacal captain Maximilian Schell (no relation to the robot Maximilian), who is on the eve of a grand experiment to take the Cygnus into the black hole, protected by an anti-gravity field. He tells his visitors that his crew left the ship voluntarily, but strange observations on the ship call the captain’s story into question -- and implies danger for the rest of the humans on board as the start of the experiment moves closer.
Is it any good?
I don’t know how to tell other people about THE BLACK HOLE. If an evil sorcerer wanted to lure me off the safe path through an enchanted forest and draw me to my destruction with a seductive siren call, he would show me something that looked like THE BLACK HOLE. He would show me the amazing miniature of the Cygnus, perched on the edge of a swirling black hole. He would show me the creepy Gothic touches like the shrouded robots and the sinister secrets that lurk deep in Cygnus’s past. He would show me a cast that includes a veritable catalog of B-list and C-list character actors. And only once I had strayed far from the safe path, lost in the underbrush with no hope of returning again, would I find that THE BLACK HOLE is form with no substance -- a cloak wrapped around a shadow -- an illusion and nothing more.
Well, not exactly nothing. But THE BLACK HOLE really is almost all seductive exterior with no guts to back it up. Not since THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) has a science fiction movie been so baffling to me in its power to disappoint. And I’ve seen this one before. I knew what to expect. I remembered being profoundly disappointed the last time I saw it, more than ten years ago. But even then, it meticulously dismantled my skepticism and built up my expectations all over again, only to dash them down. And then, worst of all, at the last minute, it held out another glimmer of brilliance that simply reminded me all over again how disappointed I was. Let me explain.
THE BLACK HOLE was more or less Disney’s answer to STAR WARS (1977). It’s a swashbuckling space opera with expensive special effects, an exotic setting, and lots of derring-do. It also has the potential to be more morally complicated than STAR WARS, since good and evil aren’t so clearly delineated and the story actually raises questions about science, ambition, discipline, and duty. THE BLACK HOLE was also the first Disney movie to be rated PG, which apparently caused a minor stir at the time for some reason. (To put it in context, a PG rating in 1979 would have put it in the company of movies like ROCKY II, MOONRAKER, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, TIME AFTER TIME, and BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.)
The movie starts out much like an episode of Scooby-Doo. Robert Forster’s Mystery Machine breaks down in a deserted part of space and he decides to use the telephone at the creepy old spaceship down the road. It doesn’t happen exactly like that, of course, but it’s close. What really happens is that the ship’s computer first detects the most massive black hole it has ever seen. That’s fine enough, I suppose, but we have to pretend that nobody else has ever reported it and the computer failed to detect it until they were right on top of it. While scanning the black hole, they discover a ship nearby -- the Cygnus, which has been missing for years. In case that wasn’t interesting enough, one of the crew members on the missing ship was also Yvette Mimeaux’s father. Then while conducting a fly-by of the Cygnus (during which it looks dead and silent), they start hurtling towards the black hole or something. The Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them in with a tractor beam, but not before their ship is somehow damaged.
Okay, so that scene is a pretty good representation of how THE BLACK HOLE works. You’ve got a crew that has apparently just accidentally stumbled upon the most massive black hole ever seen: lame. You’ve got a derelict old ship which has been missing for years sitting silently at the edge of that black hole: awesome. You’ve got this business with the ship suddenly being sucked into the black hole or something: lame. You’ve got the derelict ship lighting up and locking on to them with a tractor beam they can’t escape: awesome.
There’s a reason why Scooby-Doo episodes (and many other stories) begin with cars breaking down in front of creepy old mansions. It’s because creepy old mansions are awesome. And if the creepy old mansion is awesome enough, I’m usually willing to overlook the lameness of the car breaking down in exactly the right spot. But I definitely prefer it when movies don’t force me to overlook dumb things like that, and just don’t have dumb things in them in the first place. Just give me a believable reason why the characters should be at the creepy old mansion, and I will be perfectly happy. But just having them stumble across it by accident -- that is almost always dumb. THE BLACK HOLE, I am sorry to say, has many dumb things -- but for much of its runtime, it also has many awesome things.
It’s clear almost from the beginning that things aren’t right on the Cygnus. Maximilian Schell is the only human left alive on board, and his only companions now are robots. He claims that the rest of the crew abandoned ship when they received an order to return to Earth. Schell, meanwhile, admits that he disobeyed the order so that he could stay and study the black hole further -- eventually preparing for a descent into and through the black hole itself.
All right, let’s stop here for a minute. You and I -- we know that you can’t go through a black hole. I’m not a physics guy, so I can’t talk with authority about this. But a black hole is just a very dense accretion of matter -- so dense that the escape velocity needed to break the gravitational pull is, at certain distances, greater than the speed of light. Therefore, at a certain distance (i.e., beyond the event horizon), nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. So if you go into a black hole, you are never coming back out again -- neither where you started from nor anywhere else. You just end up mushed up in the black hole along with everything else it sucked in. So this whole idea of putting an anti-gravity shield around a giant starship and flying into a black hole is nonsense at best, and suicide at worst.
This is yet another example of something that is both kind of awesome, but also pretty dumb. Giving the sole surviving human on the derelict spaceship a monomaniacal obsession with flying into a black hole is kind of awesome. It puts everybody in danger and makes Maximilian Schell seem insane but maybe also sort of brilliant. But claiming that he will fly out the other end through a white hole and having other (supposedly sane) characters believe him is pretty dumb. I’m actually willing to accept that the ultimate culmination of a life obsession with black holes would be a desire to fly directly into one, but it’s annoying that the way it’s presented means that I have to forget all the stuff I actually know about black holes first.
So where were we? Maximilian Schell wants to fly into the black hole, and Anthony Perkins is starting to think he might want to go with him. Schell is okay with that, but he wants the rest of Forster’s crew to monitor his journey from their own (now repaired) spaceship so they can take the data back to Earth. Meanwhile, the rest of Forster’s crew think flying into a black hole is crazy and are more than happy to be watching from their own (now repaired) spaceship when it happens. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. The only possible conflict could be convincing Anthony Perkins whether to stay on the Cygnus or go back with Forster and Co., and that’s not really much of a conflict since he would presumably eventually make a decision that everybody else would respect.
Except! Except the robots. There are a lot of robots in this movie. Some of them are very annoying, and were clearly designed to keep kids entertained. (Begrudgingly I will admit that it worked. I loved the dumbest of the robots when I was a kid.) On the other hand, other robots were clearly designed to be creepy and to lend to the atmosphere of mystery and danger. (This also worked -- I was terrified of these robots as a kid, and I still think they are creepy today.) The problem with this is that Disney is trying to serve two masters who want totally different things. The story of THE BLACK HOLE is a pretty grown-up tale with Gothic, almost horror-like elements. Meanwhile, kids love slapstick and funny voices. So depending upon what you want out of the movie, you are going to think that one set of robots is awesome and the other is lame (or traumatic).
But that’s not what I was going to say about the robots. Fair warning -- what comes next is a pretty big spoiler. It turns out that the creepy shrouded robots who take care of the day-to-day activities on the Cygnus are not actually robots at all. They are the remnants of the crew, which Schell turned into cybernetic zombies. They are still alive (and possibly conscious), but are programmed and function like robots. There’s not much explanation about what exactly happened, but clearly the crew now exist in some kind of living death. This, by the way, is awesome. It’s a horrifying revelation, and it turns even Anthony Perkins against Maximilian Schell. But... But so what?
Schell still controls the Cygnus and all the many robots on it. He already overpowered the entire crew of the ship, and there’s no reason he can’t do it again. (Or almost. There are hints of a potential robot rebellion, but this is never explained, barely developed, and there is no reason to expect it will happen.) Forster’s crew debates taking Schell back to face justice, but decide it is too risky. So instead they decide to get back into their spaceship and leave. At the same time, Schell decides to take the Cygnus into the black hole. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. There is no reason why everybody can’t just do what they are planning to do without getting in each other’s way.
Except! Except Maximilian Schell has ordered Yvette Mimeaux to be turned into a robot. I don’t know why. If he had just let her go back to her own ship, all of his problems would have taken off and flown away and he could have descended into the black hole unhassled just like he wanted. But instead, Forster has to mount a rescue mission and fight his way through the robots of the Cygnus. For the most part, these are some pretty awful action sequences and consist mostly of stiff robot mannequins falling off catwalks. The princess -- I mean, the scientist -- is saved, and the good guys fight their way back to their ship. Unfortunately, Ernest Borgnine turned out to be a big old chicken and he flew away without the rest of them. This, by the way, is deeply, deeply lame.
Then there’s a meteor storm (lame) and Maximilian Schell is crushed by falling stuff in the bridge (lame) and Maximilian the robot refuses to help him for no adequately explained reason (lame). One of the good robots voiced by Slim Pickens sacrifices himself to save the rest of the good guys (lame) and declines to be helped the last few feet to the waiting spaceship (lame). The surviving members of Forster’s crew get in the Cygnus’s probe ship and try to fly away, but find that it is already preprogrammed to fly into the black hole for absolutely no logical reason (lame) so they cannot escape.
This, by the way, is actually awesome. Having the survivors go through the black hole instead of escaping is a great ending both because it’s unexpected and because it gives us a chance to see what the inside of a black hole looks like. It’s just that most of the action and build-up to that moment is pretty unsatisfying and unbelievable. The biggest problem, as I alluded to earlier in giant capital letters, is that both the good guys and the bad guy want the same thing at the end of the movie. There is no actual conflict, so the movie manufactures a series of unlikely and illogical events to generate the needed climax. The frustrating thing is that it seems like there should be enough raw materials for a great conflict, and with a few more drafts of the script they might have actually figured one out that was both exciting and made sense.
A good conflict at the end of THE BLACK HOLE wouldn’t have erased all the dumb things that came before. But up until the end, the dumb and the awesome are more or less balanced. It’s possible to ignore the dumb parts and just focus on the awesome stuff. That’s still plenty frustrating, and I would be complaining about all those dumb things right now even if the ending of this movie was perfect. But they are small potatoes compared to the story problems at the end. In fact, I haven’t even mentioned half the dumb things from the rest of the movie because they hardly seem important when you remember that this is a movie which has no actual conflict in the final act.
But then the surviving good guys go through the black hole. I’ve seen this movie before, so I knew this was coming. I also had no memory at all of what the inside of the black hole looked like. Stop a minute here and imagine to yourself what you would expect it to be. This is a Disney sci-fi movie from 1979. What does a journey through a black hole look like? The safe money is on some abbreviated version of the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) journey through the monolith. In other words, a light and color show full of camera tricks and abstract patterns, meant to suggest some experience which cannot really be understood unless you experience it. But that’s not what happens. That is not at all what the inside of the black hole looks like.
Instead, Maximilian Schell and Maximilian the robot float unprotected through space. They merge into a single being. The merged being stands on a rocky outcrop, and the camera slowly pans back from their eyes in a single long shot that reveals an enormous stylized hellscape full of red rocks, tongues of fire, and the shuffling damned spirits of the robotic crew. Then Schell somehow ascends from the shot and flies up through the same landscape into a long glowing white corridor that appears to lead to a place of beautiful white light. As the light approaches, the scene dissolves, and Forster’s crew is through the black hole, in a new sector of space, safe and alive. The end. I don’t know what just happened there, but trust me that it was incredibly awesome.
Part of me wants to see THE BLACK HOLE remade. The story at the heart of the movie is kind of classic in a way. After all, it’s a lot like the story to another Disney sci-fi flick -- 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954). In both, a group of people find themselves unexpectedly on a vessel that is captained by a very refined borderline psychotic, crewed by mysterious and uncommunicative hands, and home to a horrible secret. A lot of the specific touches in THE BLACK HOLE are pretty great too. But then there are the dumb parts. I’m not sure that I could confidently untangle the good parts of the story from the bad, or that anything coherent would be left if I could. So any attempt to remake the movie would likely be doomed to failure as well -- and doubly doomed if it felt any need (as it no doubt would) to preserve recognizable elements from the original movie and shoehorn them into the story.
A space expedition (including captain Robert Forster, scientists Yvette Mimieaux and Anthony Perkins, journalist Ernest Borgnine, and robot Roddy MacDowall) comes across an apparently derelict spaceship hovering around the opening of a massive black hole. They identify the ship as the Cygnus -- an exploration vessel that went missing decades ago with its entire crew. While investigating closer they are caught by the gravitational pull of the black hole, but are saved when the Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them to safety using a tractor beam.
On board the Cygnus, the explorers discover a ship populated by robots -- including a hulking red bruiser called Maximilian, mute shrouded types with reflective faceplates, and a beat-up old model voiced by Slim Pickens. They also find megalomaniacal captain Maximilian Schell (no relation to the robot Maximilian), who is on the eve of a grand experiment to take the Cygnus into the black hole, protected by an anti-gravity field. He tells his visitors that his crew left the ship voluntarily, but strange observations on the ship call the captain’s story into question -- and implies danger for the rest of the humans on board as the start of the experiment moves closer.
Is it any good?
I don’t know how to tell other people about THE BLACK HOLE. If an evil sorcerer wanted to lure me off the safe path through an enchanted forest and draw me to my destruction with a seductive siren call, he would show me something that looked like THE BLACK HOLE. He would show me the amazing miniature of the Cygnus, perched on the edge of a swirling black hole. He would show me the creepy Gothic touches like the shrouded robots and the sinister secrets that lurk deep in Cygnus’s past. He would show me a cast that includes a veritable catalog of B-list and C-list character actors. And only once I had strayed far from the safe path, lost in the underbrush with no hope of returning again, would I find that THE BLACK HOLE is form with no substance -- a cloak wrapped around a shadow -- an illusion and nothing more.
Well, not exactly nothing. But THE BLACK HOLE really is almost all seductive exterior with no guts to back it up. Not since THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) has a science fiction movie been so baffling to me in its power to disappoint. And I’ve seen this one before. I knew what to expect. I remembered being profoundly disappointed the last time I saw it, more than ten years ago. But even then, it meticulously dismantled my skepticism and built up my expectations all over again, only to dash them down. And then, worst of all, at the last minute, it held out another glimmer of brilliance that simply reminded me all over again how disappointed I was. Let me explain.
THE BLACK HOLE was more or less Disney’s answer to STAR WARS (1977). It’s a swashbuckling space opera with expensive special effects, an exotic setting, and lots of derring-do. It also has the potential to be more morally complicated than STAR WARS, since good and evil aren’t so clearly delineated and the story actually raises questions about science, ambition, discipline, and duty. THE BLACK HOLE was also the first Disney movie to be rated PG, which apparently caused a minor stir at the time for some reason. (To put it in context, a PG rating in 1979 would have put it in the company of movies like ROCKY II, MOONRAKER, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, TIME AFTER TIME, and BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.)
The movie starts out much like an episode of Scooby-Doo. Robert Forster’s Mystery Machine breaks down in a deserted part of space and he decides to use the telephone at the creepy old spaceship down the road. It doesn’t happen exactly like that, of course, but it’s close. What really happens is that the ship’s computer first detects the most massive black hole it has ever seen. That’s fine enough, I suppose, but we have to pretend that nobody else has ever reported it and the computer failed to detect it until they were right on top of it. While scanning the black hole, they discover a ship nearby -- the Cygnus, which has been missing for years. In case that wasn’t interesting enough, one of the crew members on the missing ship was also Yvette Mimeaux’s father. Then while conducting a fly-by of the Cygnus (during which it looks dead and silent), they start hurtling towards the black hole or something. The Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them in with a tractor beam, but not before their ship is somehow damaged.
Okay, so that scene is a pretty good representation of how THE BLACK HOLE works. You’ve got a crew that has apparently just accidentally stumbled upon the most massive black hole ever seen: lame. You’ve got a derelict old ship which has been missing for years sitting silently at the edge of that black hole: awesome. You’ve got this business with the ship suddenly being sucked into the black hole or something: lame. You’ve got the derelict ship lighting up and locking on to them with a tractor beam they can’t escape: awesome.
There’s a reason why Scooby-Doo episodes (and many other stories) begin with cars breaking down in front of creepy old mansions. It’s because creepy old mansions are awesome. And if the creepy old mansion is awesome enough, I’m usually willing to overlook the lameness of the car breaking down in exactly the right spot. But I definitely prefer it when movies don’t force me to overlook dumb things like that, and just don’t have dumb things in them in the first place. Just give me a believable reason why the characters should be at the creepy old mansion, and I will be perfectly happy. But just having them stumble across it by accident -- that is almost always dumb. THE BLACK HOLE, I am sorry to say, has many dumb things -- but for much of its runtime, it also has many awesome things.
It’s clear almost from the beginning that things aren’t right on the Cygnus. Maximilian Schell is the only human left alive on board, and his only companions now are robots. He claims that the rest of the crew abandoned ship when they received an order to return to Earth. Schell, meanwhile, admits that he disobeyed the order so that he could stay and study the black hole further -- eventually preparing for a descent into and through the black hole itself.
All right, let’s stop here for a minute. You and I -- we know that you can’t go through a black hole. I’m not a physics guy, so I can’t talk with authority about this. But a black hole is just a very dense accretion of matter -- so dense that the escape velocity needed to break the gravitational pull is, at certain distances, greater than the speed of light. Therefore, at a certain distance (i.e., beyond the event horizon), nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. So if you go into a black hole, you are never coming back out again -- neither where you started from nor anywhere else. You just end up mushed up in the black hole along with everything else it sucked in. So this whole idea of putting an anti-gravity shield around a giant starship and flying into a black hole is nonsense at best, and suicide at worst.
This is yet another example of something that is both kind of awesome, but also pretty dumb. Giving the sole surviving human on the derelict spaceship a monomaniacal obsession with flying into a black hole is kind of awesome. It puts everybody in danger and makes Maximilian Schell seem insane but maybe also sort of brilliant. But claiming that he will fly out the other end through a white hole and having other (supposedly sane) characters believe him is pretty dumb. I’m actually willing to accept that the ultimate culmination of a life obsession with black holes would be a desire to fly directly into one, but it’s annoying that the way it’s presented means that I have to forget all the stuff I actually know about black holes first.
So where were we? Maximilian Schell wants to fly into the black hole, and Anthony Perkins is starting to think he might want to go with him. Schell is okay with that, but he wants the rest of Forster’s crew to monitor his journey from their own (now repaired) spaceship so they can take the data back to Earth. Meanwhile, the rest of Forster’s crew think flying into a black hole is crazy and are more than happy to be watching from their own (now repaired) spaceship when it happens. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. The only possible conflict could be convincing Anthony Perkins whether to stay on the Cygnus or go back with Forster and Co., and that’s not really much of a conflict since he would presumably eventually make a decision that everybody else would respect.
Except! Except the robots. There are a lot of robots in this movie. Some of them are very annoying, and were clearly designed to keep kids entertained. (Begrudgingly I will admit that it worked. I loved the dumbest of the robots when I was a kid.) On the other hand, other robots were clearly designed to be creepy and to lend to the atmosphere of mystery and danger. (This also worked -- I was terrified of these robots as a kid, and I still think they are creepy today.) The problem with this is that Disney is trying to serve two masters who want totally different things. The story of THE BLACK HOLE is a pretty grown-up tale with Gothic, almost horror-like elements. Meanwhile, kids love slapstick and funny voices. So depending upon what you want out of the movie, you are going to think that one set of robots is awesome and the other is lame (or traumatic).
But that’s not what I was going to say about the robots. Fair warning -- what comes next is a pretty big spoiler. It turns out that the creepy shrouded robots who take care of the day-to-day activities on the Cygnus are not actually robots at all. They are the remnants of the crew, which Schell turned into cybernetic zombies. They are still alive (and possibly conscious), but are programmed and function like robots. There’s not much explanation about what exactly happened, but clearly the crew now exist in some kind of living death. This, by the way, is awesome. It’s a horrifying revelation, and it turns even Anthony Perkins against Maximilian Schell. But... But so what?
Schell still controls the Cygnus and all the many robots on it. He already overpowered the entire crew of the ship, and there’s no reason he can’t do it again. (Or almost. There are hints of a potential robot rebellion, but this is never explained, barely developed, and there is no reason to expect it will happen.) Forster’s crew debates taking Schell back to face justice, but decide it is too risky. So instead they decide to get back into their spaceship and leave. At the same time, Schell decides to take the Cygnus into the black hole. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. There is no reason why everybody can’t just do what they are planning to do without getting in each other’s way.
Except! Except Maximilian Schell has ordered Yvette Mimeaux to be turned into a robot. I don’t know why. If he had just let her go back to her own ship, all of his problems would have taken off and flown away and he could have descended into the black hole unhassled just like he wanted. But instead, Forster has to mount a rescue mission and fight his way through the robots of the Cygnus. For the most part, these are some pretty awful action sequences and consist mostly of stiff robot mannequins falling off catwalks. The princess -- I mean, the scientist -- is saved, and the good guys fight their way back to their ship. Unfortunately, Ernest Borgnine turned out to be a big old chicken and he flew away without the rest of them. This, by the way, is deeply, deeply lame.
Then there’s a meteor storm (lame) and Maximilian Schell is crushed by falling stuff in the bridge (lame) and Maximilian the robot refuses to help him for no adequately explained reason (lame). One of the good robots voiced by Slim Pickens sacrifices himself to save the rest of the good guys (lame) and declines to be helped the last few feet to the waiting spaceship (lame). The surviving members of Forster’s crew get in the Cygnus’s probe ship and try to fly away, but find that it is already preprogrammed to fly into the black hole for absolutely no logical reason (lame) so they cannot escape.
This, by the way, is actually awesome. Having the survivors go through the black hole instead of escaping is a great ending both because it’s unexpected and because it gives us a chance to see what the inside of a black hole looks like. It’s just that most of the action and build-up to that moment is pretty unsatisfying and unbelievable. The biggest problem, as I alluded to earlier in giant capital letters, is that both the good guys and the bad guy want the same thing at the end of the movie. There is no actual conflict, so the movie manufactures a series of unlikely and illogical events to generate the needed climax. The frustrating thing is that it seems like there should be enough raw materials for a great conflict, and with a few more drafts of the script they might have actually figured one out that was both exciting and made sense.
A good conflict at the end of THE BLACK HOLE wouldn’t have erased all the dumb things that came before. But up until the end, the dumb and the awesome are more or less balanced. It’s possible to ignore the dumb parts and just focus on the awesome stuff. That’s still plenty frustrating, and I would be complaining about all those dumb things right now even if the ending of this movie was perfect. But they are small potatoes compared to the story problems at the end. In fact, I haven’t even mentioned half the dumb things from the rest of the movie because they hardly seem important when you remember that this is a movie which has no actual conflict in the final act.
But then the surviving good guys go through the black hole. I’ve seen this movie before, so I knew this was coming. I also had no memory at all of what the inside of the black hole looked like. Stop a minute here and imagine to yourself what you would expect it to be. This is a Disney sci-fi movie from 1979. What does a journey through a black hole look like? The safe money is on some abbreviated version of the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) journey through the monolith. In other words, a light and color show full of camera tricks and abstract patterns, meant to suggest some experience which cannot really be understood unless you experience it. But that’s not what happens. That is not at all what the inside of the black hole looks like.
Instead, Maximilian Schell and Maximilian the robot float unprotected through space. They merge into a single being. The merged being stands on a rocky outcrop, and the camera slowly pans back from their eyes in a single long shot that reveals an enormous stylized hellscape full of red rocks, tongues of fire, and the shuffling damned spirits of the robotic crew. Then Schell somehow ascends from the shot and flies up through the same landscape into a long glowing white corridor that appears to lead to a place of beautiful white light. As the light approaches, the scene dissolves, and Forster’s crew is through the black hole, in a new sector of space, safe and alive. The end. I don’t know what just happened there, but trust me that it was incredibly awesome.
Part of me wants to see THE BLACK HOLE remade. The story at the heart of the movie is kind of classic in a way. After all, it’s a lot like the story to another Disney sci-fi flick -- 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954). In both, a group of people find themselves unexpectedly on a vessel that is captained by a very refined borderline psychotic, crewed by mysterious and uncommunicative hands, and home to a horrible secret. A lot of the specific touches in THE BLACK HOLE are pretty great too. But then there are the dumb parts. I’m not sure that I could confidently untangle the good parts of the story from the bad, or that anything coherent would be left if I could. So any attempt to remake the movie would likely be doomed to failure as well -- and doubly doomed if it felt any need (as it no doubt would) to preserve recognizable elements from the original movie and shoehorn them into the story.
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