The Black Hole – Disney’s Answer to Star Wars
By stephanie - Monday, July 24th, 2006
In 1979, Disney released The Black Hole, an epic sci-fi “spectacular” coasting on the success of Star Wars. I recently watched The Black Hole on DVD, which is the first time I’ve seen the film since I was a child. (My memories, as such, were faint, but included vague ideas of some crazy villain getting sucked into a swirling black hole at some point.)
The Black Hole never matched the success of Star Wars nor the amount of respect, and as such, I was expecting the film to be total shlock. Surprisingly, I found The Black Hole to be enjoyable and interesting on many levels. It’s not a perfect film, and has several problems that have obviously kept it from becoming a classic, but it does have some good things going for it.
The basic story: A spaceship runs across a derelict ship, the Cygnus, that has been lost for 20 years. Now circling a massive black hole, the Cygnus is being manned by a mad scientist who has plans to travel through the black hole on the ship. Running the ship is a cadre of menacing robots and cyborgs, including Maximillian, a large clunky red monstrosity that has what appears to be spinning metal egg beaters as its main weapon.
The cast includes Anthony Perkins (Psycho) and Ernest Borgnine, with Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens providing the voices for the two good guy, cutesy robots, Vincent and Bob. These robots were patterned after R2D2 but they fly and have big eyes that show expression by the raising and lowering of their helmets. I wasn’t taken in at first, but warmed up considerably after a bit.
As plots go, The Black Hole has some interesting, dark twists (for a Disney film), and the film doesn’t waste any time. From the moment the movie starts, we’re drawn into action as the small spaceship starts getting sucked into the black hole prior to landing on Cygnus, the bigger ship. From there, it’s mostly non-stop action throughout the film.
The film’s main problem is that it’s dated – and in fact, the acting and directing style seems dated even for 1979. I felt like the heroes were stuck in a 1960s time warp, for all their chirpy Disney dialogue and clean-cut appearances. The worst part of the film were the laser fight scenes, which are just slow and boring for today’s audiences, never mind the bizarre turns the soundtrack takes at those points. (The orchestral music slows down and practically turns into “Pomp and Circumstance” for the fight scenes – so much so, I found it distracting.)
Yet, some of The Black Hole stands up well to the test of time. Visually, I found The Black Hole to be absolutely mesmerizing in many ways, despite the old school technology. The close-up shots of the Cygnus, lit up against the starry sky, were spectacular. The interior of the ship has massive dimension and is beautifully designed. In these cases, I don’t find new CGI technology to be any better than the use of models or matte paintings.
Not all holds up well – the “meteorite” shower is a bit clunky, especially on a standard TV screen, except for the fantastic ride of one mighty “meteorite” through the ship in what is often recognized as the precursor to Indiana Jones’ famous boulder scene.
Sadly, a few basic scientific faux pas hurt the film, and probably keep it from getting taken too seriously. At times, people seem to be able to step outside the spaceship into a vaccuum and still breathe, even as they float off into space towards the black hole. The roof of the spaceship seems to disappear on convenient occasions, just to allow someone or someting to float towards the spinning black hole. And the ending is…well, just bizarre.
They explain in the bonus materials that The Black Hole didn’t have any real ending written into it at first…well, this is obvious. But you’ll have more respect for the film overall when you see what machinations they had to go through to make the film appear as it did, back before CGI. The film received Academy Award nominations for special effects, and for good reason. Three years later, Disney created “Tron” using computer graphics, which was a pioneering move on their part, and marked the end of the old way of doing special effects.
Still, it’s not the old school effects that keeps The Black Hole firmly in the “film curiosity” file. Ultimately, what keeps The Black Hole from becoming a sci-fi classic is its lack of rewatchability. It’s just not fun enough to want to watch over and over again, like Star Wars, and it’s not deep enough to matter. Still, it’s worth a looksee, if you enjoy seeing how people did sci-fi “back in the day.”
July 24th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
I loved this movie when I was a kid. I even had the soundtrack!! (wow, I really did. WHAT WAS I THINKING). It wasn’t a bad movie at all really, a little scary and hardcore for a 9 year old but I have to blame something for how I turned out. The robots were freaky, especially when one of them limped. Its funny how the two robots, Vincent and Bob were based on R2D2 but could fly, which is what R2D2 discovered he could do in Star Wars 3 but couldn’t do in any other Star Wars movie….. hmmmm
February 27th, 2007 at 12:02 am
I loved this movie when i saw it as well, but i’m 25 as of 2007…. Something about the mixing of human and cyborg (read vincent and bob) and the warping of humanity (the unreactive bots at the consoles) made me think real hard about the future of humanity. Even as a youngster exposed to terminator, etc. I found some awesome morales in how people react to such huge scientific truths as the earth is round, or a black hole consumes everything. From a philosophical, not scientific point of view, I find blackhole a turning point in my fellow humans view on reality…. What if we on this planet are not all powerful?