A movie-freak acquaintance was whining the other day about a new and alarmingly fatuous trend that he claimed was spreading through movie criticism faster than an Ayatollah joke at a cocktail party. All reviews these days, he said, brandishing some work by lesser critics, had to have a reference to the budget of the film under discussion in their third paragraphs. The $42-million Star Trek. The $32 million Apocalypse Now. The $4.98 Roller Boogie. Why bother, he asked. Who cares? What difference does it make how much it costs - we just want to know if it's good or bad.
The thing to do in a case like this - under attack by Philistines - is to deny everything while devising a rationale that will explain your transgressions once the denials are exposed. As it happens, I was innocent: Film budgets are of little concern to me, and I never mention them in the third paragraph. The rationale was harder; I didn't know why money was all the critical rage, nor could I explain what budget had to do with quality.
Then came The Black Hole, which cost $20 million to make and opened nationwide over the weekend. Black Hole is the first entry by Buena Vista (the Disney studio) into the PG-rated, not-strictly-for-kiddies film market, and it reminds us just what a movie's budget had to do with the way it plays.
These days, that money goes to special effects. They are the current cinema rediscovery, their devisors' names are becoming Hollywood-household names and the bright new talents are hailed periodically as Orson Welleses of the '70s. Apocalypse Now is dazzling because its combat effects (and the way they were edited and soundtracked) were worth $32 million. Star Trek is an embarrassment because $42 million ought to buy a lot more than zoom shots of space-ship miniatures and space-psychedelia recycled from 2001.
And The Black Hole, like Alien ($10 million), is a wonderful bargain. You can say whatever you want about special effects and their death-grip on filmmakers' attentions – and it seems only a matter of time until gimmicks replace character and plot as central devices, leading to Robot Love and Mondo Blood Squib – but this is a movie saved by its effects, and you won't want to miss them.
The Black Hole is something special. It's simple space-epic story, follows a starship that happens upon a mad-scientist type holed up on the "horizon" of a fearsome "rip in the fabric of space. It is dependent almost exclusively on its effects (robots, rocket ships on wires, meteor showers, the Hole itself) and the matte work (background drawings that supply the effects of great depth, distance and space).
Granted, the dialogue is Disney-preposterous: "My God, says Ernest Borgnine after a peek at the hole, "it's like Dante's Inferno." There are some improbably bad performances (Joseph Bottoms and Robert Forster as pilots, Anthony Perkins as a creepy scientist, Yvette Mimieux as a woman) and a few lapses in basic space sense (characters tossed out into the void keep breathing, but what?). But somehow, the over-all effect is just fine.
The effects build slowly, then cut loose. There are gunfights among the robots that crackle with excitement. Some of the robots fly, and you can never see the wires. There's a meteor shower that will bring you right out of your seat, and a climactic whirl through the black hole that lives up to its apocalyptic billing.
John Barry's music, filled with the swooping motion that made his James Bond scores so effective, propels the story. And even the dialogue eventually redeems itself: "A wolf remains a wolf even if it has not eaten your sheep," opines a robot, and you have to love the little guy, solid-state dickens.
Those mattes, by Harrison (Star Wars) and Peter (Mary Poppins) Ellenshaw, make for many scenes of startling beauty. The Disney folks ducked the violence issue by staging their worst combat among the robots, who can be slaughtered without trauma. And Gary Nelson (Freaky Friday) directs with a flair for action. Nothing sophisticated here -- just a great-fun movie.
THE BLACK HOLE is rated PG on the strength of its action sequences, which could seem harmless for all but very young children; the film could easily be rated G.
Copyright © 1979 The Miami Herald
This page is exclusively maintained by Denis Warburton.