[Nerdspresso] Down the Black Hole: 45 Years in the Dark with Disney's Sci-Fi Misfire

I saw my first rated PG movie in 1979. Let me rephrase, I saw my first rated PG movie without my parents in 1979. I was a little kid and it kind of happened by accident. Normally, my folks would never let me go see a movie unchaperoned if the MPAA said it wasn’t a good idea. But you see, my parental units were mislead. They were the victims of brand loyalty and the strong pull of a sale on bellbottom jeans at the JCPenney. 

My mom and her friend arranged a playdate for me one Saturday afternoon with her friend’s kid. I don’t think the moms paid much attention to the movie ratings when they dropped us off for a matinee.  Really, how much trouble can two kids under 12 years old get into at a suburban movie theater? We got deposited in the new Disney movie with a bucket of popcorn and two small cokes while our mothers took off for the mall. 

It was a Disney movie so everything’s all good, right? Disney movies are safe for little kids. That was the one constant in the kid movie universe, especially back in the late ‘70s before Mickey became the apex predator of a major media empire. So we saw a Disney movie, but it was no kiddie cartoon tale. It was a live-action, PG-rated sci-fi thriller. The studio’s first experiment in more mature storytelling. 

This movie was a dark space odyssey about explorers discovering a ghost ship hovering on the edge of a monstrosity so powerful, not even light could escape its grasp. We’re talking about The Black Hole, people! And it kind of freaked me out a little bit. Now 45 years later with adult wisdom and many MANY movies in my rearview, I can see this movie more clearly for its aspirations. Here was the Mouse House’s attempt to grab a fat wad of that juicy Star Wars cash by hooking obsessed fans with their own epic featuring noble heroes, sinister villains, and funny robots. I just remember sitting terrified in my seat, feebly nibbling on my popcorn. 

While my moviegoing newbie card had been confiscated a few years earlier with Star Wars, the rest of my cinematic experiences were pretty tame. I was certainly a little skittish around some of this movie’s darker moments, but I was really more concerned about being caught unsupervised at a PG movie. That just wasn’t done in my family. We were a straight up G-rated household. We never crossed the MPAA. I was in constant fear of being discovered and ejected by the usher for watching a movie without the suggested parental guidance. 

My paranoia exacerbated my anxiety over the “scary” bits in this film, making it much more intense in my little kid mind. I have watched The Black Hole a few times over the last four decades, including a screening recently on Disney+. To be honest, it’s really not that scary. It’s a little creepy in parts, but creepy like your big sister making monster noises under your bed. It wasn’t really terrifying or all that complex. It’s basically a sci-fi retelling of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is a much better Disney adventure film (and not even rated PG). 

The Black Hole starts out promising with ominous music with credits over a computerized grid depicting this menacing astronomical phenomenon. For 1979, these were pretty boss effects. Once the credits wrap, things guickly grow tepid. The spaceship Palomino slowly emerges onscreen, loping across the blackness under monotonous audio about the ship’s functions. The line readings are so flat, it sounds like the cast recorded everything separately at different times during filming. Nothing feels authentic. 

We soon meet the crew inside and things don’t improve. Their lack of chemistry is woefully apparant. It’s not that they’re bad actors. The cast is full of some decent talent, but I think they all took the job without reading the script. There is an inertia to the performances like they are not really sure what to do next. Everyone seems slightly confused and uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the director’s fault. Gary Nelson helmed this flick and he had a made a couple previous flicks for Disney, including Jodie Foster’s Freaky Friday. Maybe he just wasn’t adept at this genre. His strength must not be directing actors to look at bluescreens and pretend to see stuff. 

Robert Forster (Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown) and Joseph Bottoms (you’re not going to recongize anything else this dude has done; he peaked with this flick) play the captain and his trusty second-in-command. Anthony Perkins (Psycho) and Yvette Mimieux (who was a starlet in ’60’s movies and trying to play a serious grownup here) are the science officers. Ernest Borgnine (C’mon, people. You know Ernest Borgnine!) is Harry Booth, who I think is supposed to be a journalist documenting the Palomino’s deep space mission. He also helps out with the ship’s operations and wears a snazzy turtleneck so I could be totally wrong about his job here. 

The crew is completely upstaged by a dapper robot named V.I.N.C.E.N.T. (it’s some totally useless acronym, but it spells out his name). He’s voiced by Roddy McDowell (Planet of the Apes) and makes pithy remarks while trying to remind you of both R2D2 and C3PO. I’m thinking Roddy got the best deal out of this whole gig. He gets the most memorable lines and has a telepathic bond with Mimieux’s character. I’m not really sure how you establish an ESP link with a robot, but whatever. I think the writers wanted something that sounded futuristic.

The Palomino discovers a derelict spaceship near a massive black hole so they head over to investigate. The space junk is identified as the USS Cygnus, an experimental space cruiser that was lost in space two decades earlier. These moments are my favorite in the entire film. The Cygnus is one of the coolest looking spaceships ever. It’s long, majestic and slightly regal with intricate lattice work and towers jutting out from the surface. The ship is completely dark when the Palomino does a flyover and these views are chilling. 

All these effects were acheived with models and matte paintings because this movie was made in the days before computer generated imagery. The close ups of the hull of the Cygnus are mesmerizing. The level of detail is remarkable. The film captures textures off the models that make the ship feel authentic in a way that computer effects could never capture. There is a scene when all the lights on the Cygnus suddenly blink on, illuminating the entire craft. It still takes my breath away after all these these years. And I’ve seen this flick more than a few times. 

Our heroes board the Cygnus and they are greeted by Dr. Hans Reinhardt, the ship’s charismatic and slightly unhinged commander. He’s been living alone on the ship for 20 years after sending his crew back to Earth (or so he says). Reinhardt is played by Maximilian Schell, who was a big deal in the ‘60s and ’70s but is mainly known now for this flick and for playing Tea Leoni’s dad in Deep Impact. Even though his mission was recalled, Reinhardt stayed behind to stretch the boundaries of science by studying this mysterious black hole. 

He replaced his crew with a bunch of subservient robots, who don’t look at all creepy in their  flowing black robes and shiny blank faces. Order is maintained by the massively intimidating Maximilian (no relation to Schell) — a giant red robot with spinny blades for hands — and his android legions. All is not what it seems with Reinhardt and, as our friends investigate further, they realize they are on a collision course with whatever resides in the center of the black hole.

The movie climaxes with their attempts to escape the Cygnus before it is swallowed by this monstrosity. There’s a big chase sense with our heroes running through the labyrinthine corridors of the Cygnus with Maximilian and his automated goons in pursuit. Meanwhile, Reinhardt is on the bridge, bringing his nefarious plan to its epic conclusion. Schell pulls Reinhardt straight from the egomaniacal madman playbook. He’s really playing to the cheap seats here. No scenery is left unchewed. 

While there is no subtlety to his characterization, there’s not a lot of layers to any of these performances. All the characters are pretty black and white. Forster is brave because he yells at the bad guy. You know Bottoms is reckless and cocky because he chomps gum and cracks jokes. Perkins is the devoted scientist because he wears a lab coat and says “remarkable” a lot. Mimieux is the damsel in distress because Forster needs someone to rescue in the third act. And then there’s Borgnine with that snazzy turtleneck. Need I say more?

The spaceships and the black hole effects are really the big reason to watch this movie. Many of the effects hold up, especially the shots of the Cygnus against the black hole. Everything else is a bit of a misfire. The story moves at a glacial pace until you get to the last 30 minutes when everything goes gazoo. As the Cygnus gets sucked into the black hole, the ship starts to buckle, but that doesn’t stop our heroes from running hither and yon. They don’t even react to the chaos around them. I guess they really took the director seriously when he said “Just run that way.”

The laws of physics don’t seem to apply here. Everything seems to happen simply because it will look cool on screen. And it definitely looks cool. It just doesn’t make much sense. At one point, a runaway asteroid tears through the ship, but even that doesn’t stop our friends from running. I mean, I’m sure I would run like hell if an asteroid was chasing me, but I also think all the oxygen would have gotten sucked out when it breached the hull. Am I being too hard on a movie that was clearly targeted at young people jonesing for more sci-fi in the wake of Star Wars? As an adult four decades later, should I really be talking smack about a kid’s movie? 

As a kid, I remember being dazzled by the sets and the effects, but also being very aware that the whole thing could have been better. Disney tries to both thrill and frighten you with The Black Hole and misses the target. This movie was not the blockbuster Disney was anticipating. It lost them a ton of money and it was years (maybe decades) before they really scored with genre content. 

They tried again a few years later with Tron, but that was only a middling success. You wonder if Mickey’s bosses were motivated to buy the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas as a way to finally achieve what they set out to back in 1979. Over the years, nostalgic movie nerds like me revisit The Black Hole to reconcile our childlike wonder with this film’s ridiculous guilty pleasures. Android adversaries that move like windup toys? Robots with ESP? Scary bad guys that are essentially giant food processors? Catch it now on Disney+ and see for yourself. 

There’s been talk about remaking The Black Hole as a limited streaming series or even doing a big screen reboot. Joseph Kosinski, the guy behind Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick, was interested at one point, but I don’t know where that all stands now. He might be the right man for the job. If he can direct Tom Cruise effectively, malevolent robots should be no problem. But when all is said and done, maybe it’s just better to just let this one drift in the blackness of space. Leave it to be rediscovered by intrepid explorers and nervous kids cautiously watching it without grownup supervision.