Disney’s The Black Hole is far from the dark disaster of its reputation.
If I had a nickel for every time a movie was released in order to chase the afterglow of Star Wars‘ box office but ended up delivering a stately, metaphysical science fiction contemplation, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice in the December of 1979, when The Black Hole followed Star Trek: The Motion Picture into cinemas, dazzling audiences with its measured, meditative pacing and emphasis on spectacle over narrative urgency, the zero-G fidelity of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on one side and the warm, marketing-friendly merchandisable robots of Lucas’ far, far away galaxy on the other.
Burdened with the dubious distinction of being Disney’s first ever PG-rated film, The Black Hole is a curious artefact from a studio wrestling with its identity. This is Disney just before the Eisner years, clinging on to older sensibilities and even older instincts while glancing trepidatiously at a darker, more daring cinematic future. What they ended up producing feels less like one giant leap and more like a heavily supervised small step onto a much bigger, more ambitious soundstage.
When the crew of the USS Palomino stumbles upon the long-lost USS Cygnus perched impossibly at the edge of a black hole, they find only one survivor of the doomed expedition: the mysterious Dr Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell, gravel-voiced and with enough gravitas to resist the pull of the swirling singularity single-handed) and an army of eerily obedient robots. What follows is a kind of haunted house in space, filtered through a script that too often prefers genteel philosophical pondering over tension or propulsion. There are the first flickerings of what could – and would – become Event Horizon here, but Disney’s The Black Hole isn’t interested in explicit horror. That’s not to say nothing happens: there are gunfights and meteor storms and a chilling reveal or two, but for the most part it has the energy and drive of a museum tour.
Schell leads a surprisingly heavyweight cast for what is, fundamentally, a pulp sci-fi flick. Robert Forster is the straight man in a role so straight it barely flexes to allow for the charisma of command. It’s the role that, thirty years earlier, Leslie Neilsen had played in Forbidden Planet, a film which The Black Hole surely counts amongst its direct ancestry. Yvette Mimieux and Joseph Bottoms are present, technically, the former gifted a plot-relevant ESP ability while the latter serves mostly as action-backup to Forster. Anthony Perkins brings an aloof stoicism in a Spock-like role while Ernest Borgnine, ever the pro, seems to be enjoying himself as the film’s Scotty proxy just enough to not get fired. The robots, however, steal the show: V.I.N.CENT (voiced by Roddy McDowall) and B.O.B. (voiced by Slim Pickens) manage more emotional nuance with floating eyeballs and synthesised Southern drawls than most of the human cast can muster, while Maximillian, the silent, incarnadine sentinel of Reinhardt’s robot forces comes tantalisingly close to the iconic aesthetic status of Darth Vader himself.
But the real star is the Cygnus itself. The ship’s vast, cathedral-like structure is a marvel of production design, a gothic latticework of light and shadow that wouldn’t look out of place in Alien or Metropolis had they been produced by Irwin Allen. Cinematographer Frank V Phillips and effects wizard Peter Ellenshaw conjure up a haunting, suspended nightmare that remains among the most visually distinctive sci-fi exteriors and interiors ever committed to film. This is where the money went, and it shows, even if they did have less than half the budget of their Starfleet competition. Both films also benefit from a sumptuous orchestral score and both have the audacity to open with an overture over an entirely black screen and while John Barry’s no musical slouch, he’s also no Jerry Goldsmith. Barry’s score is suitably operatic and grandiose but lacks the depth and complexity of Goldsmith’s iconic Motion Picture soundtrack, offering two or three recognisable themes which are recycled as leitmotifs to varying success.
While the production and character design, and the music to a more modest degree, soar, the script and pacing frequently struggle to reach escape velocity. The dialogue leans hard into philosophical posturing without earning its weight, and the film never seems quite sure who it’s for. Too slow and contemplative for kids, too cutesy and sentimental for adults, it hovers uncertainly between audiences like the Cygnus itself, ever on the cusp of being swallowed by something more definitive. Its sci-fi lede is buried, the grand ideas it deals with – it may be the first movie to mention the now almost cliche concept of an Einstein-Rosen bridge in dialogue – mumbled almost out of embarrassment, and it shies away from the full, grotesque body horror it implies, to become a muted hybrid of thwarted potential and underdeveloped ideas.
Still, The Black Hole deserves credit for daring to be strange, even if it follows a curiously parallel course to the Enterprise‘s encounter with V’ger. The Black Hole‘s final moments, a surreal descent into something approximating heaven, hell or a purgatorial combination of both, are so audaciously weird that they retroactively lend the preceding stodge an air of tragic metaphysical grandeur. It’s not a film that lands every blow, but it throws a few punches that leave bruises and while Rodenberry’s big screen opus ends with a hopeful ascension of man and machine to a new, higher plane of existence, Doctor Reinhardt’s involuntary assimilation by Maximillian condemns both to an almost Dantean realisation of Hell.
As an object of retrospective curiosity, it’s worth seeking out – not because it’s a lost classic; it was never lost and it’s not quite a classic, but because it’s a beautifully mounted misfire with incandescent flickers of ambition that are impossible to extinguish. Disney’s black sci-fi sheep in a shiny crimson helmet, The Black Hole will have you staring into the abyss and finding something oddly compellingly watchable staring back at you from that implacable red optical slit.
