Caroline let us all know at work last week there was an hysterical movie on the Sci-Fi channel, starring Judd Hirsch, called Black Hole, in which a Black Hole consumes Saint Louis and we should watch it for the entertainment value. And she was ssssoooooo right.
Watching this movie was not like watching Breaking Away after I went to school at Indiana University for a semester. There were no “Hey, there’s my Baskin-Robbins!” moments. This movie was soooooo baaaaad and sooooo inconsistent with Saint Louis geography it was insane.
First, it starts with an aerial view of downtown, dated already because Busch Stadium is now gone. However, it must have been in the last ten years because the newly-renamed Millennium Hotel, our giant phallic symbol downtown with the rotating, I don’t know, corona, had been painted a flesh tone, which I think they did ten years ago because they didn’t think it looked phallic enough.
Then the pan does a big skip to Forest Park and the Planetarium, which they captioned “Midwestern Quantum Research Laboratory.”
“GARY!” I screamed “You have to get in here!” and I jumped the TiVo back to the beginning. We laughed knowing the giant dinosaurs outside the Planetarium were CGI-replaced with giant power lines. We waved at the temporary military outpost, the Soldier’s Memorial, which we had just visited for the first time after the Race for the Cure downtown. We knew in would have been directly in the path of the Black Hole as it ate Busch Stadium and most of downtown. We snickered at the reference to 60th and State street, neither of which exist, much less an intersection.
The best part was when the Black Hole destroyed the Arch. Big belly laughs there. The Arch would not let a Black Hole mess with it. The Arch survived the Mississippi Flood of ’03, even though the river gave us all a scare and came five steps away from it. The Arch has a self-preservation mechanism built in. If a tourist or terrorist nears the Arch, they are compelled to touch it, then they shriek and yank their hand away surprised that a giant stainless steel structure becomes hot left out in the sun.
I have to admit, I can’t give an unbiased review of the movie (though I suspect it was pretty awful). I was primarily distracted that all the scientists wore fabulously stylin’ eyeglasses, ones that no one in Saint Louis would wear, much less a scientist at our esteemed Midwestern Quantum Research Laboratory (ha).