12/04/2017

The Black Hole

        
Hey, Disney made a 'Star Wars' movie! No, not those 'Star Wars' movies - this is 1979. Remember 'The Black Hole'? Oh right, well I'm going to be talking about it for the next 375 words anyway. 
                    
So our main characters are on a little exploration ship, and they find this big lost ship on the edge of a black hole. It's controlled by a mad scientist, and there are lots of annoying robots everywhere.
The main one was the worst. It was obviously meant to be the R2 character, but the attempts at cuteness were just irritating. The script was also impressively bad, with characters often making laughably obvious statements or musing pointlessly on boring subjects. The actual acting wasn't so bad, but was often bland. There was never really a main character, other than the wacky scientist guy, and I never really cared about any of them. 
             
                     
The plot progressed weirdly slowly sometimes (why such a long setup and dinner scene?) then at other times kicked into high gear and stopped making much sense (so after twenty uneventful years, a whole storm of meteors come to fuck up the ship just as the protagonists are trying to escape?). A lot of stuff just randomly happens for no apparent reason too, like that whole bit at the start where they were having so much trouble docking, or the target shooting match the robot had with that other robot that then never shows up again. This whole film could have been half an hour long and would be far more interesting for it. 
The effects weren't terrible for the time and the budget, and I liked the design of the big ship's interior and the swirling of the black hole itself (though it didn't look very scientifically accurate, but then little was in this film). Some of the shots were downright beautiful, though often kinda goofy (as an example see the picture I used for this review. Looks cool, huh? Yeah, well that's a meteor, which broke into the ship and then rolled along inside it...) I feel like this should have been adapted into an episode of 'Star Trek' or something (maybe have the main characters be an away team that can't beam back for some reason, but who then escape back to the Enterprise on the probe ship or whatever - maybe have Brent Spiner as the mad scientist), but it was just about passable as a children's sci-fi adventure.
                       
The Black Hole: 30.1