Desperate to rejoin ‘the conversation’ in post-STAR WARS Hollywood, Disney producer (later President & CEO) Ron Miller, a son-in-law-also-rises hack, went full bore Space Opera with this compromised product that pleased few.* (He’d do much the same for the animation side of things with THE BLACK CALDRON/’84, shortly before he was forced out.) Encased in an impossibly elegant physical production, the film is brought down by just about everything else, starting with an oddly uneventful story that plops a small research space ship at the gravitational cusp of an all-engulfing Black Hole where an immense, long-lost observation station hovers and Maximilian Schell, the 'lost' ship’s sole surviving crew member, plays Captain Nemo to a robotic army. Dark secrets will be revealed, but the narrative builds little pull or tension under functional tv director Gary Nelson while a typical Disney cast of worn or disinterested actors (Anthony Perkins, Yvette Mimieux, Ernest Borgnine, Joseph Bottoms, Robert Forster) labor in front of visual backgrounds yet to be ‘matted’ in. Or cringing every time that little vacuum-cleaner shaped robot assistant appears, a cute replicant of R2D2 but with the prissy vocals of C3PO (courtesy of Roddy McDowall). With the exception of an unexpectedly abrupt killing (a shockingly effective bit), moments of action are few and far between until the usual last act shoot-outs & chases before the film’s ambiguous ‘deep-think’ punt of a finale. After special events like this, the changing of the guard couldn’t happen fast enough with Miller ankling just as SPLASH and new CEO Michael Eisner came aboard in 1984.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Miller’s two previous credits: THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG STRIKES AGAIN and UNIDENTIFIED FLYING ODDBALL, typical kiddie fodder for Disney at the time.
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