Falling back into The Black Hole

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cygnus I just watched The Black Hole with Michele. I haven’t watched it in probably twenty years, but it’s always held an extremely powerful nostalgic pull on my imagination. When I was a kid, I went through a period of obsession with this film—we’re talking a Black Hole lunchbox, a Maximillian model, a Black Hole storybook/record… the works.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to revisit this as an adult. It’s widely regarded as a mediocre film, and perhaps my subconscious has been trying to spare me the tragedy of seeing a piece of nostalgia exposed as just another overwrought B-movie.

But having re-watched it at last, I’m happy to say that, to my surprise and relief, I very much enjoyed it. For all its shortcomings, it works—the whole turns out to be much more than the sum of its parts.

While it’s fresh on my mind, here are a few of the elements that make The Black Hole shine, despite the failings that critics have, with just cause, pointed out.

1. The ships and effects. Put simply, the spaceships, set design, and overall visual atmosphere are superb. The Palomino nails the Millenium Falcon aesthetic: a bit ugly and looking like it’s been around the block a few times, yet rugged and appealing. But of course the Cygnus, palace of the mad space scientist Dr. Reinhardt, is the star of the show; it’s one of the most unique and impressive-looking spaceship designs I’ve ever seen. Its strange latticework structure; its cathedral-like spires; the cavernous inside spaces that make life seem so tiny and out of place inside it. Other films have used spaceship design to suggest a cathedral-in-space (Event Horizon‘s Core, the recent Battlestar Galactica‘s Resurrection Ship; the Auriga of Alien: Resurrection), but none match the Cygnus, a drifting temple to its captain’s hubris.

The Black Hole will also make you pine for the days before real, actual, physical models were replaced by the CGI apocalypse. There’s a visceral, tactile appeal to the models here that more than compensates for the now-dated special effects.

2. Dr. Reinhardt is a wonderful villain. He’s a great mad scientist in the classic vein. Those fools told him that what he was doing was impossible, even insane! But he’ll show them. It’s probably a serious misstep that The Black Hole makes Reinhardt’s Ahab-style madness apparent from his very first appearance; it dulls the impact of our eventual discovery that he’s a totally crazy murdering megalomaniac. But hey, we knew that anyway, and it gives Maximilian Schell lots of opportunities to ham it up.

3. It’s weird and dark, with lots of unnerving details. The “robot” unmasking scene scarred me for life as a child, and it retains some of its shock value today even though it’s obviously a guy in makeup. The “robot” funeral leaves you wondering uncomfortably how much humanity might still lie buried away, despite one character’s insistence that the mental damage is irreversible. At one point, after the deeply creepy Maximillian has murdered Kate’s crewmate, Reinhardt leans close to her and begs her to protect him from Maximillian. Is he mocking her? Is he living in constant terror of Maximillian, who might really be running this horror show? Wonderfully, the movie never tells us.

And then there’s this surreal closing scene, which is a perfect metaphor for Reinhardt’s ghoulish kingdom and an evocative, unsettling picture of a personal, self-created hell:

OK, so I’m in love with this film. But it’s certainly not perfect. What keeps it from greatness?

Professional critics have more than weighed in on it’s shortcomings already; I won’t dispute those critiques, but I can’t say that the commonly-cited problems (weak script, uneven acting, a continual contrast between the film’s exciting imagery and plodding dialogue) bothered me as much as they should’ve. I will point out a few things that kept me from wholly buying into The Black Hole despite my enjoyment of it:

1. The actions scenes are weak. It feels wrong to knock a movie for having insufficiently awesome action scenes, but the action scenes in this movie are universally unconvincing and unexciting. The evil sentry robots, described as an “elite” force at one point by Reinhardt, have worse aim than Stormtroopers—look, I know they’re not really supposed to hit anything or anybody important, but they have to look like they’re trying. There’s one large gun battle in particular that is so ineptly staged that it really damages the sense of immersion.

2. Reinhardt’s secret is too obvious and revealed too early. Look, we know Reinhardt’s an insane mad scientist, but the “big reveal”—what really happened to the crew—is telegraphed continually throughout the movie’s entire second act. When we finally get our confirmation, it’s lost most of its effectiveness.

3. The science is distractingly bad. For the first few minutes, it seems like The Black Hole is going to at least pay decent lip service to Real Science—enough to let us suspend our disbelief about all this black hole business. Nobody’s asking for Stephen Hawking levels of scientific integrity here. But the movie’s final act, which takes place while the Cygnus is being pulled inexorably into the black hole, throws all believability out the window. Characters breathe in open space. They outrun meteors. It’s really distracting.

Despite its flaws, this is a worthwhile film. I’m glad I finally mustered the courage to revisit this piece of childhood nostalgia, and I’m quite confident I’ll return to it again.

Anyone who can be trusted in little matters can also be trusted in important matters. But anyone who is dishonest in little matters will be dishonest in important matters.

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This cautionary video clip, brought to you in 1993 by The 700 Club, has been making the rounds:

(More info here.)

Mocking Pat Robertson, and more specifically the anti-D&D hysteria of the 80s and early 90s, is a bit too easy at this point, so I won’t bother. But I do want to point out a few things about this video, which aims to scare people away from Dungeons and Dragons by suggesting that playing the game leads to child sacrifice and the wearing of terrible homemade wizard/KKK robes.

The most obvious thing is that nothing at all in this video remotely resembles anything that ever would be said, seen, done, or heard at a Dungeons and Dragons game. The “game” that they’re playing, which looks like a homebrew Candyland variant, bears no resemblance to D&D.

No big surprise there; few anti-D&D attacks like this showed signs that their creators had ever seen or read D&D, or talked to people who did. But look at the date this video was released: 1993, almost twenty years after D&D was first created! It’s even ten years later than Jack Chick’s infamous Dark Dungeons tract. In those two decades, nobody at The 700 Club had so much as flipped through a D&D rulebook at Toys ‘R’ Us. That graduates it well into “willful ignorance” territory.

And for somebody trying to warn of the dangers of pop culture trends, Pat Robertson has completely missed the boat here; by 1993 D&D’s heyday of popularity was well behind it. A little card game called Magic: the Gathering was just about to explode onto the scene, and as far as evil roleplaying games went, Vampire: The Masquerade and its sister games had decisively eclipsed D&D as the Shock Your Parents™ games of choice. In 1993, D&D was quaint.

Consider what this video says about Robertson’s intended audience. Anybody who had actually played D&D would immediately dismiss it as being insulting, slanderous, and irrelevent; so it clearly wasn’t bothering to address people actually playing the game. This video is talking only to people who had no clue what D&D was about, and who could be relied upon to never try to find out. Despite either laughable ignorance or simple contempt for truth, Robertson was asking people to respect his judgment about a topic they knew little about.

Ah, well. If you want to know what really goes on in the dark basements of D&D players, this remains the best source.

(Bible quote is from the Contemporary English Version.)

In D&D, the crew always goes down with the ship

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On a whim, I dug out my old AD&D Spelljammer books this afternoon. Spelljammer is the woefully under-appreciated space fantasy setting for 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons; instead of crawling through dungeons looking for goblins to murder, you captain a magic-powered sailing ship through Ptolemaic outer space looking for space goblins to murder. My high school game group really got into it; Spelljammer gave us one of our most memorable game campaigns.

While the general tone of Spelljammer is “swashbuckling adventures in space,” my gaming friends were not content to handwave away the everyday practicalities of space adventuring. When you own a magic space boat, you’ve suddenly got to worry about questions like “How little can we pay our crew without triggering a mutiny?” I found several type-written sheets going into the details:

spelljammersheet

At first I thought that the “expendables” listed here were consumable items like food and ammunition. But no, that’s the term my players used to describe the ship’s crew. Which is a pretty good summation of most of our Spelljammer adventures.

Looking through this material made me realize how much I miss Spelljammer; it took the inherently silly concept of “D&D… in spaaaaaace!” and wrapped it in just enough seriousness to make it playable, while proudly retaining its goofy side. It only appeared as an official setting during the 2nd edition era; bits and pieces of it turned up in 3rd and 4th editions, but never as a standalone campaign setting. Perhaps one day we’ll return to the stars.

I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day… I got in.

“Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!”

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Earlier this week, I was decluttering the basement, a task made more challenging by the fact that my five-year-old daughter had chosen to spread Adorable Kid Art™ all over the floor. It was going just fine, and the world made perfect sense, until I came across this page, apparently torn out of the most demented children’s coloring book in the Known Universe:

aaaaahhhhh

What the… who the… where I have seen this before? Oh, right:

Masons_baphomet

The similarities are pretty clear. I don’t know who Baphomet is calling on that telephone there, but you know it’s not going to end well for the free world.

scared

So apparently my daughter is a Templar. Or maybe a Freemason. (Jack Chick has a really great¹ tract about the Freemasons and Baphomet, but I can’t bring myself to link to his website.)

Footnotes:

^[1] crazy

Why is this ‘Mech so terrible?

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Die result (1d6)	It’s terrible because of…	Example
WHY IS THIS BATTLEMECH SO TERRIBLE? (roll 1d6)
1	Ideology	The ‘Mech’s poor design is intentional, designed to encourage or discourage certain types of behavior on the battlefield. “It’s shameful the way our Mechwarriors keep their distance from the enemy, sniping at long range, when everyone knows the true spirit of bushido is manifested in face-to-face battle. Well, without any ranged weapons, this ‘Mech will force its pilots to fight with honor.”
2	This is What Was Available	The ‘Mech was cobbled together using the only resources and equipment available to its designers. Nobody’s under the illusion that it’s a good design, but it’s better than nothing. “We’ve got a warehouse full of heavy ‘Mech chasses, and a big pile of small lasers. Might as well put ’em to use… better than letting them sit around gathering dust.”
3	Lobbying	A weapons manufacturer bribed its way into a sweet contract with the government, despite the uselessness of the product. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger—it says here we’re required by our contract to equip every ‘Mech we make with no less than five TrueAim Plus(tm) brand small lasers….”
4	Untouchable Designer	However ridiculous the end result, the ‘Mech was designed by somebody that nobody dared criticize or contradict. “Why, this ‘Mech was designed by the Crown Prince himself. Surely you’re not implying that His Imperial Majesty knows nothing of battlefield strategy and technology, are you?”
5	Production Line Screw-up	An error on the manufacturing floor resulted in a badly mis-configured ‘Mech, but by the time anybody noticed, the cost of fixing the mistake had become prohibitive. “Oh dear, we’ve just equipped 500 assault ‘Mechs with armaments meant for light ‘Mechs. But they’ve already started shipping to the frontlines….”
6	It Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Way	The ‘Mech was an experimental test platform (or maybe a practical joke by an over-tired engineer) that was never intended for mass production. But key emails were skimmed instead of carefully read, and you can guess what happened next. “Don’t worry, nobody would possibly be stupid enough to mistake this for a serious production design… right?”

FileTR3025_Front_Cover One of the most-read books in my game library when I was in junior high and high school was Technical Readout 3025, a collection of ‘Mechs that you could use in your Battletech games. They were designed using the construction rules in the rulebook, but were also the “official” ‘Mechs used by the different factions within the Battletech setting.

What surprised me at the time was that the Technical Readout contained a number of ‘Mechs that were terribly designed.

By that, I mean that there were numerous ‘Mech designs in the book that were obviously inefficient or just generally ineffective. At the time, I was spending my evenings and weekends poring over the ‘Mech construction rules figuring out how to most efficiently balance weapons, armor, and speed in ‘Mech designs. When “official” ‘Mechs appeared that were subpar, I was surprised and almost offended.

Nowadays, I realize that poorly-designed ‘Mechs are a feature of the setting, not a bug. They add verisimilitude to the Battletech universe. Just as in our modern militaries there are plenty of examples of poorly conceived, ineffective boondoggles, so the militaries of the Battletech world would have been plagued by such things. But at the time, I was mostly just annoyed that I had paid money for a book that contained ‘Mech designs no competent player would ever want to be stuck with.

It looks cool, but trust me… you don’t want to be stuck piloting one. And you know, it doesn't even look that cool.

The worst offender, by far, was the CGR-1A1 Charger, an assault-class ‘Mech (at 80 tons, one of the heaviest ‘Mechs in the setting) that had almost no effective weaponry and mediocre armor. With an armament of just five small lasers—the wimpiest, shortest-ranged weapons in the game—it was completely outclassed by ‘Mechs half its weight. It was slightly faster than other heavy ‘Mechs, but not faster than the light and medium ‘Mechs that outgunned it. Its only conceivable battlefield advantage was its weight; if it could close to melee range, it could (in theory) deliver a pretty hefty punch or kick. But trust me: while your 80-ton clunker is making its own personal Charge of the Light Brigade at an enemy unit, you can bet that it’s getting showered with missiles, lasers, and autocannon fire every step of the way. Because your enemy is not stupid enough to be piloting a Charger.

At the time, the presence of the Charger was an inexplicable annoyance. These days, it’s a charming part of the setting. And it makes for a fun excercise to imagine how such a poorly-conceived ‘Mech would make it from the planning stages to the actual battlefield. Above is a quick chart I put together to answer the question. When you’re handed a terrible ‘Mech to play with, just roll a six-sided die on the chart above to see how it came to be.

Obviously, this’d work with any military or sci-fi game, with slight tweaking. What other reasons should be added to this table?

More human than human

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Hey, ‘net punk! Look what some clever console cowboy has revealed on the inter-tron today:

OK, so it’s just a video game. But this is a kind of a big deal if you’re into tabletop roleplaying games, because this is a video game based on Mike Pondsmith’s venerable Cyberpunk 2013 (later Cyberpunk 2020, later Cyberpunk 203X) roleplaying game setting.

And that’s interesting for a number of reasons. First, the Cyberpunk RPG is an oldie, firmly planted in the mirrorshades era of the cyberpunk genre; the kind of cyberpunk where you brush aside your ’80s bangs and “jack in” to a Gibsonesque (and by “Gibsonesque” I mean “ripped straight out of Neuromancer“) proto-internet and talk sneeringly about “meatbags.” There are “fresher” cyber-themed RPGs out there (Eclipse Phase, Shadowrun, Transhuman Space) that might be thought to offer a nicely updated cyberpunkish basis for a modern game.

Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk hasn’t been much in the public eye for years. The last time it was the focus of any attention, its most recent edition was being dragged over the coals for using what can only be described as “doll art” to illustrate its rulebook:

Let’s just say that it didn’t emerge from those discussions with a lot of dignity intact.

But I don’t mean to mock. (Let me go on record as believing that the “doll art” thing contains a seed of genius, but was badly executed.) This new Cyberpunk video game is a reminder that there is a long history of tabletop RPGs—even obscure and mostly defunct ones like Cyberpunk—that are ripe for reinvention and re-exploration, in video games or other media. That’s exciting.

So let me offer a few comments on the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer above.

The “2077” is presumably a reference to the year in which the game is set. Interesting; I believe that Shadowrun, the most prominent cyberpunk RPG still in print, is also currently set in the 2070s. I guess that “50-60 years from now” is about what seems right for a setting that needs to have advanced significantly beyond current technology levels, but not so far that it isn’t recognizeable and relatable.
This game follows on the very popular cyberpunk video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Is vintage cyberpunk making a comeback?
The technical quality of this trailer—the animation style, the music, everything—points to a pretty spectacular end-product.
The lady in this trailer isn’t dressed very appropriately for a dangerous nighttime urban dystopian environment; but then again, she’s got the retractable arm-scythes, so she can wear what she wants. The future is cheesecake.
I’ll expand on that a bit. The association of eroticism with violence in entertainment media, such as this video game trailer, makes me uncomfortable, but I’ll concede that I’m probably a few decades too late to raise that particular concern (and it’s been a staple of cyberpunk since Ghost in the Shell and probably earlier). I will say: the cyberpunk genre is about a future defined by out-of-control marketing of all types (including sexual) and the augmentation of the human body, so in theory there are some interesting, and possibly even prescient, points to be made about violence, sexuality, and the ultimate victory of style over substance. But I’m not holding my breath that this video game is where we’ll see that handled with insight.

Well, we’ll see where this all winds up. But we can be sure it won’t top this artifact from the glory days of cyberpunk gaming:

The places I’ve been

Et tu, Facebook?

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So I just logged into Facebook to see what’s going on (and to wince at the inevitable flood of political posts) and I got this message:

I guess “not posting anything for a week or two” is just too frequent for Facebook.

On the plus side, being restricted from using Facebook for a few days will help me stay sane during Election Day and its immediate aftermath.

εν τούτῳ νίκα

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Driving around town has been a little dispiriting lately. The reason sounds a little silly: it’s those signs. You know, the red yard signs that proclaim TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY IN NOVEMBER.

These signs are clearly linked to Republicans—they’re invariably planted next to signs for Romney/Ryan, Justin Amash, and other conservative candidates—although I’m not sure if they’re part of any specific candidate’s campaign. But I do know that they seem to be everywhere. I pass several of them every day in the last half-mile of my drive home from work, and every day it makes me feel just a little bit tired and sad.

I find the message behind these signs depressing. “Take back our country”? Do the people who plant these signs really think they’re living in a country occupied by some enemy force? Apparently, the president wasn’t elected by fellow Americans in the usual democratic process; he (and those who voted for him) “took over.” Obama and his supporters aren’t human beings to argue with or campaign against; they’re enemies to be purged.

Who is this sign even talking to? Certainly not to Obama voters—they aren’t to be reasoned with; they’re to be overthrown by the “real” Americans.

And then there’s the obvious, uncomfortable racist undercurrent of this message, especially when it’s planted proudly on lawns in a predominately white city.

It makes me depressed just driving by these things.

Every election cycle, Americans seem to agree on at least one thing: politics is too nasty, too divisive, too graceless, too mean-spirited. Well, here’s one very simple, concrete way you can tone down the vitriol of this election cycle: step outside. Walk out to your yard. It’s fine to leave that Romney/Ryan sign up, or the Justin Amash one, or the Pete Hoekstra one.

But take down the one that says I HATE YOU.

The Staging Point

a microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan