The Black Hole (movie review)

• Title: The Black Hole
• Year: 1979
• Rating: PG
• Director: Gary Nelson
• Cast: Maximillian Schell, Robert Forster, Joesph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Roddy McDowall (voice)

The explorers of the USS Palomino stumble upon the long lost hulk of the USS Cygnus, parked at a stable point beyond a Black Hole. But the Cygnus is not truly dead, though its crew are gone and replaced by automatons. The ship’s last human, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, reveals his ultimate plan to fly into the Black Hole, but all is not what it seems on the Cygnus…

Rewind . . .

. . . and I’m in the theater with my parents, wowing to something a bit like a cross between Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey — Star Wars in respect to its cute robots and laser shootouts, and 2001 with the slow panning camera work and the use of the mysterious of space to create awe and dread. Awe and dread . . . was I really only four years old when I saw Disney’s first stab at a PG movie? Or did I catch the 1982 rerelease? Either way I remember loving the film, and the creepy aspects of it are the things I remembered most about it.

Top of the creepy list is Maximillian Schell as Hans Reinhardt, the Ahab-cum-Nemo-cum-Dr. Frankenstein evil genius at the heart of the film. Schell nails the right level of urbane charm and wild-eyed fanaticism the role demands, and he gives a great, operatically over-the-top performance as the man who hijacked his vessel, enslaved his crew, and plans on flying into a black hole in the furtherance of science and his own monstrous ego. And yes, spoilers be damned, you can’t talk about The Black Hole without dwelling on one of the salient parts of the movie — that the crew of the Cygnus, whom Reinhardt has said all fled the ship to return to Earth, are still on board as a lobotomized army of cloaked and masked ‘robots.’ The explorers of the Palomino gradually discover this, and the hints in the form of a robot funeral and a servitor that walks with a limp are eerie and sad at the same time. When one of the Palomino’s own crew is threatened with this transformation, it’s the kick-start to the action heavy finale of the film which includes several impressive and imaginative sequences as the explorers try to escape a doomed Cygnus.

Bait for the Star Wars crowd comes in the form of robots. Firstly, there are the cute floaty types VINCENT and BOB (voiced by Slim Pickens!), whose names are anagrams that stretch all credulity. VINCENT is a pugnacious and plucky quoter of aphorisms, who doesn’t shrink from throwing down with Reinhardt’s sinister security ‘bots, and BOB is a Cygnus local and pariah, of a slightly older model than VINCENT and badly damaged by decades of abuse. The two form a double act against the gun-toting guards that have the run of the ship, and the big red devil himself, Maximilian, a slab-sided, multi-armed psychotic robot that is Reinhardt’s enforcer. The David and Goliath match-up between VINCENT and Maximilian (was it weird for Maximilian Schell to be calling that thing by his own name I wonder?) is fun, if a bit forced, and the robot design in the film is appealingly original.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . and I couldn’t tell you the last time I had seen this movie prior to the rewatch for this review. The Black Hole never seemed to be cable fodder, it was never on in constant barrages like Big Trouble in Little China, Enemy Mine, The Bride, or Ice Pirates. I have some memory of watching it on a TV screen at some point, but hardly with the frequency of some of the other films in my Movies of a Misspent Youth series. However, something about this film really stuck with me ever since I first saw it in theaters, and it seems as familiar to me as many of those films I’ve seen dozens of times.

But, that’s not to say my perspective hasn’t changed over the years. Upon watching the film again I was struck first-and-foremost by how slow it is in comparison to modern movies, especially modern SF movies. That doesn’t personally bother me, in fact I quite enjoy it, but I couldn’t imagine showing it to a kid today. The deliberate pace is of the 2001 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture school, in which space effects are lingered over and almost eulogized. John Barry’s bracing orchestral score reinforces the whole effect, one that proclaims EPIC with every crescendo. While the new breed of SF film typified by Star Wars was coming to the fore — films in which the space setting was treated in an off-hand fashion, and the action of the story was front-and-center at all times — The Black Hole hearkens back a time when filmmakers were content to let the whole dazzling concept of space itself fill the screen and sink slowly into the conciousness of the audience.

And, in all truth, such an approach is one of the most effective things about The Black Hole, because a Star Wars plot is not in the offing. The characters of the Palomino are themselves not very memorable, nor does the conflict take on any of the visceral or mythic resonance of space opera. In fact — and here is something mostly lost on my younger self — the attempt to add some resonance in the form of a heaven-hell analogy mostly falls flat. Yes, the quotes from Dante’s Inferno and the Bible lend a bit of depth, but the utter conviction that the Black Hole itself has some literal connection with human concepts of a netherworld or afterlife on the part of some of the characters perhaps takes the metaphor too far — as do the final scenes of the movie, which try to hit a 2001-style awe-inspiring resonance and come across instead as, well, rather Disney. I wasn’t really surprised to learn in the DVD special features that the ending for the movie hadn’t yet been finalized when shooting had begun on the film.

The Black Hole does come across as a bit schizophrenic at times — from cuddly robots to robot lobotomies, from laser blasters to the blast furnace of Hell — it’s not quite kid-friendly, but nor does it satisfy completely as adult fare. But that is not to say it isn’t good at what it does, and its very easy to get swept up in the sheer visual weight of the film and forgive it its flaws and pretensions. It’s an ambitious film stuck between the two poles of space opera and science fiction, Star Wars and 2001, and one that I think deserves more credit for being good at what it does.

• Nostalgia Rating: Gravity-defying
• Rewatch Potential: Every so often
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
• Unexpected Cameo: Hardly a cameo and not even unexpected, but Roddy McDowall isn’t listed in the credits as the voice of VINCENT.
• Verdict: An over-looked cult classic with top-of-the-line visuals of the old school which aspires to great things but doesn’t always achieve them.

What I Learned: Never trust a Borgnine, and that black holes can be Hell.

Top Marks: The special effects department. The Black Hole is the last of the ‘old style’ effects movies, and it does the tradition proud (Disney’s next SF offering would be the revolutionary Tron). Unable to use Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, then the pioneers of several new effects techniques, Disney did the effects for this film in house, via the old methods. Much of the look of the film comes down the matte paintings — and The Black Hole uses more mattes than any film to date (there are more matte paintings and effects shot in The Black Hole than in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back . . . combined). From the massive interiors of the Cygnus, to the dark-on-dark swirling maelstrom of the black hole itself, the look of this movie is impressively original and, while the expected limitations of a thirty-year old film are obvious to anyone now, The Black Hole still manages to delight. Scenes of particular punch are the first reveal of the bridge (which I for a moment thought might be a later addition, à la George Lucas!), the rolling meteor, and the dinner party where the dark bow of the Cygnus stretches across a star field behind the dining crew and the camera moves freely back and forth amongst them.

If (When) It’s Remade: Would there ever be a reason to remake it? Of course, I said that about Clash of the Titans and The Day the Earth Stood Still, so what do I know? To state the obvious: over-the-top-action – intelligence (CGI + winking references to original film) = Hollywood Remake.

Final Thoughts: It’d be nice to see a modern SF film made with a bit more of a deliberate pace, as the slow introduction for The Black Hole really pays off when it comes to the action of the climax, and gives us a reason to contemplate the visuals to boot. Something about this approach to films about space just adds a certain weighty believability to the visuals — and reminds us that space and space travel are hardly things we have any right to be blasé about.

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.