In the 22nd century, the crew of the small deep space probe Palomino find themselves dangerously close to an enormous black hole. VINCENT, the ship's all-purpose robot, spots the silhouette of another space vessel against the enormity of the black hole, identifying it as the U.S.S. Cygnus, the largest American manned deep space mission ever launched, which stopped reporting back home twenty years before. More intriguing than the discovery of the Cygnus is the fact that the enormous ship is holding its own against the black hole's gravity. Trying to investigate the Cygnus, the Palomino is caught in the gravity field of the black hole and sustains major damage. Forced to seek refuge near the Cygnus, the crew discovers a field of zero gravity around the large ghost ship. An even bigger surprise awaits when the Cygnus lights up without warning, after failing to respond to numerous attempts at communication from the Palomino. Palomino Captain Holland, along with scientists Kate McCrae and Alex Durant and blustery reporter Harry Booth, explore the ship with VINCENT, but it soon becomes apparent that someone - or something - is leading them carefully to the bridge of the ship and keeping them from other parts of the ship. The bridge is populated by robed robots, much to the disappointment of Kate, whose father was part of the original Cygnus crew. An enormous red robot appears and threatens the crew, and VINCENT puts himself between his crewmates and the menacing machine. A voice from the dimly-lit captain's chair calls the robot off, and welcomes Holland and his crew aboard. It is Dr. Hans Reinhardt, the Cygnus' legendary eccentric commander. Reinhardt tells the story of the Cygnus encountering a disaster which forced the crew to abandon ship, and caused the death of McCrae's father. Reinhardt also reveals that he has developed the anti-gravity field that allows the Cygnus to maintain its position to study the black hole, but in the course of further conversation it also becomes apparent that Reinhardt may be mentally unstable. And despite Reinhardt's order to help the Palomino crew find parts to repair their ship, his robot Maximillian makes no secret of the fact that it would like nothing more than to turn VINCENT into scrap metal.

VINCENT finds an old battered robot called BOB, an earlier version of himself, in charge of the ship's equipment stores. BOB has been obviously been terrorized and brutalized by Maximillian in the past, but finally reveals some vital information to VINCENT: Reinhardt's crew mutinied against him when the scientist took it upon himself to rewrite the mission of the Cygnus, and Kate's father was murdered in retaliation. The rest of the crew is still aboard - their minds wiped and reprogrammed by Reinhardt, they are, in fact, the legions of shrouded "robots" who solemnly attend the ship's stations. Alex becomes intoxicated by Reinhardt's misguided genius, and Harry sees nothing less than the story of the century (with his byline, of course). VINCENT warns Holland, Pizer and Kate of the deadly secrets of the Cygnus, and when Kate tells Alex, Maximillian kills him. Reinhardt's new mission is to defy the laws of nature, drive the Cygnus through the black hole, and find out what - if anything - is on the other side. And he wants his visitors to help him...or die.

You're probably saying to yourself, "Go ahead, admit this movie is one of your guilty pleasures from childhood." I adamantly refuse to say any such thing. This movie is still one of my favorites even today. The long distance shots of the black hole are truly cool - later in the movie, when the spaceships move closer and eventually plunge into what is obviously a red-tinted whirlpool of water, the black hole is much less menacing - and the Cygnus in particular has an interestingly grandiose design somewhere between a cathedral and a greenhouse design (which would be wildly impractical for a real spaceship). But my favorite thing about this movie? The robots! What cool robots! We're not talking about the walking tin men which are so obviously costumed actors. I like the little round guys, VINCENT and BOB. Admittedly, BOB's old-timey Western voice treatment is silly - did he always sound like that, or did he download a new voice patch after he'd been beaten up a bit? - but VINCENT is one of the all-time coolest robots ever to grace the big screen. Cool voice, cool anti-gravity schtick, and a great blend of anthropomorphic features, robot-ish-ness, and cuteness. Who cares if he spent the entire movie hanging from piano wire? I don't. I loved VINCENT. And I've still got the action figure to prove it. Maximillian, on the other hand - the big red robot who carves up Anthony Perkins like so much Thanksgiving turkey - scared the piss out of me for years after I first saw the movie. I had that action figure too, but somehow during playtime, VINCENT always managed to kick some serious robotic butt. Okay, enough about the robots. (I just wanted to remind you, however, that I really liked the robots in The Black Hole.) And even if it's common knowledge that the whole thing is a sci-fi retelling of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the star-studded cast does an admirable job; only Joseph Bottoms ever really seems to overdo it.

The end sequence, starting roughly where the surviving crew members realize they're on a direct course for the black hole, is an astonishingly bizarre montage of surreal sounds and images which, while they seem a to be suggesting several more specific concepts than 2001's wild end sequence, are still a kind of celluloid Rorschach test for the viewer. Now, some of the scenes are pretty broadly obvious - if you somehow miss the suggestion of a journey through Hell with a capital H right out of the Old Testament, you may need some new contact lenses. And it helps that this entire montage is liberally drenched with some of the best music John Barry ever created. Okay, maybe the 2001 comparison is indeed far-fetched. But one has to admire the mythical-impressionistic-hallucinogenic atmosphere of this part of the movie. Rather like everything about this movie, it was well outside of the usual bounds of Disney fare of the time (remember, this movie came out long before Touchstone Pictures ever existed). One trick I can't figure out is how the camera kept spinning around and even under the crew's seats while simultaneously doing a constant 360-degree yaw tumble. Years before the remake of Cape Fear, this must have been one hell of a camera rig.

Oi, Disney! I want this soundtrack released on CD! And Tron too! But more about the latter another time. (For the record, there's a respectable slice of the movie's main theme and the most frequently heard action theme on Silva Screen's "Space and Beyond" CD - see the LogBook Master Index of Soundtracks for more info - but I want the whole thing, especially the hell sequence. One can hear hints of what would later become the main theme from Out Of Africa as BOB dies at the end of the film.)

• screenplay by Jeb Rosebrook and Gerry Day
• story by Jeb Rosebrook and Bob Barbashi & Richard Landau
• directed by Gary Nelson
• music by John Barry
• Cast: Maximilian Schell (Dr. Hans Reinhardt), Anthony Perkins (Dr. Alex Durant), Robert Forster (Captain Dan Holland), Joseph Bottoms (Lt. Charles Pizer), Yvette Mimieux (Dr. Kate McCrae), Ernest Borgnine (Harry Booth), Tommy McLoughlin (S.T.A.R.)
• Oops: One thing I have to point out happened with the video release and the version of this movie frequently shown on the Disney Channel - in the first scene of a storm of meteors approaching the Cygnus, take a look at those nasty fireballs. You'll see that they're wide-screen, oblong meteors, an artifact of an anamorphic film element which wasn't "squished" down to the proper aspect ratio with the rest of the elements in that shot. The ship is in the proper proportions - and furthermore, the meteors suddenly become round the next time camera angles change! The anamorphic meteors return in a few other shots as well. Hey, that black hole's gravity does freaky things, y'know? Another blooper I spotted isn't really a blooper so to speak, but instead the result of a brain-blooper on the part of some clever Disney censor. In one scene where Holland tells Pizer that they're going to "fight like hell," all audio manages to vanish for a few seconds. You know, people, I find that one utterance of the word "hell" to be so much more offensive to my sense of common decency than the thought of an evil robot maliciously plunging a circular saw through a man's chest. Thank you, Disney, for barring those evil words from my virgin ears.


One other thing - early in the movie, when VINCENT has to fire a tether out of his back to secure himself to the hull of the Palomino, the sound we hear is quite familiar - it's the opening door sound from the original Star Trek!