![]() Their mission is to find undiscovered life, and they detect something worth examining in the vicinity of the first black hole any of them has ever seen. The spaceship's crew is assembled from younger stars (Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimeaux), supported by old-time veterans (Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins) and a cute robot with big eyes (voiced by an uncredited Roddy McDowall). After John Hough ( Escape to Witch Mountain, 1975) declined an offer to direct, Freaky Friday helmer Gary Nelson came on board after seeing 'miniatures and matte paintings' by the great Peter Ellenshaw. Initially conceived as a "space-themed disaster film" by writers Bob Barbash and Richard Landau, inspired by The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), the script was developed, reworked, and rewritten. Voices are then heard as the opening credits roll and a fixed image of a star screen comes into view, which is a pleasantly different way to begin a science-fiction picture and sets the tone for the drama to follow. The film begins on a grand note with a two-minute musical overture composed by John Barry against a totally black screen, which I didn't recall at all from my single viewing during its initial theatrical release. ![]() And what movie could be more appropriate than a crushing disappointment? Thus, when news broke earlier this week that the first image of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy had been captured, my thoughts turned, of course, to a movie. The presence of Robert Forster, who I'd enjoyed watching as the star of the 1930s private eye TV show Banyon earlier in the 1970s, did little to mollify my overall disappointment.īut I remain a foolish optimist. Since I had absolutely no expectations for another science-fiction picture releasing later that memorable month of December 1979, surely The Black Hole couldn't be any worse? Alas, I thought it was even worse, a pallid attempt by Disney to cash in on a trend that they didn't understand and had no hope of ever comprehending. (I detailed my own crushing disappointment in an article I wrote for Screen Anarchy some years ago. Into that superheated dawn of the Geek Age, Robert Wise's stately Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) failed to capture even an iota of its own inspiration, a canceled television show that spawned a raft of rabid followers. Now Streaming: In the wake of the unexpected success of George Lucas' Star Wars (1977), followed by Steve Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978), everyone in Hollywood and beyond wanted to go to space, or at least emulate their successes by making their own version of what they did.
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