Viking Night: The Black Hole
By Bruce Hall
September 1, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Or was it earlier tonight? I don’t know, because it felt the same. John Barry’s score is majestic and polished. It’s even got a goddamn honest to God overture. Do you know what that means? It means what you’re about to see is so awesome they have to start the music 10 minutes before the movie! This is followed by the first use of computer graphics ever in a film. By the time the credits ended, all the hype I’d built in my mind about this movie already seemed to have come true. I don’t remember a lot from that year. I lost a lot of baby teeth. And I think my sister was born, but I’m not sure.
I was too busy watching the trailers and anticipating The Black Hole, and thanking God I lived in the glorious futurama that was the 1970s.
And then I watched it again, today. Things seem initially promising, when the deep space exploration ship Palomino drifts across the screen. The ship’s computer - an adorably pompous little robot named Vincent - is using a lot of authentic sounding technical jargon to explain that he’s discovered a black hole in their path. A black hole, as we all know is “something something a thing that’s in space,” and “not even light can escape.” Robert Forster, Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine round out an impressive cast for the time, unless you were my age. I had no idea who these people were; I was just there for the “something something space” part.
Star Wars taught us that space is full of snooty sentient robots with British accents, and spaceships that shoot lasers that blow up other spaceships. That’s what I wanted, and that’s why I was there.
So as I watched The Black Hole again after all these years, I actually felt the same sense of awe and wonder that I did when I was a kid. For just a few minutes, it was actually kind of exciting. The Palomino discovers not just the black hole, but a long lost starship called the Cygnus, where (by incredible coincidence) the father of crew member Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux) was once stationed. The Palomino is almost sucked into the black hole (in one of the few genuinely interesting action sequences) as they attempt to dock but once there, they discover the ship’s enigmatic captain, Hans Reinhart (Schell). According to Reinhart, the crew was sent back to earth and must have totally gotten lost, so now he’s accompanied only by an army of android servants, and a hulking death-bot named Maximilian.
And...nobody questions this.
Meanwhile, Reinhardt spends his time speaking in grand, sweeping proclamations filled with out of context bible quotes and nonsensical, made-up techno-jargon. Obviously, something is very wrong aboard the Cygnus. But because they are also characters in this movie, nobody else has the presence of mind to start asking hard questions when it becomes clear that Reinhardt is batshit insane. In fact, our heroes never do anything heroic until it's nearly too late to act, after it was clear they should have made the opposite decision to begin with. Once it becomes clear they should probably leave, they do so with all the urgency of someone who’s put off by the color of the carpet, instead of people who are terrified by human tragedy.
It's hard to root for people who continue to place themselves in obvious danger simply because the people who wrote the story couldn't think of a more believable way to create tension. This is the film’s greatest flaw.
Despite the obvious danger, the good guys blather in stilted, fake sounding sentences meant to sound brilliant, but instead are closer to the way I assume stupid people THINK brilliant people speak. When they discover the black hole, our science geniuses stand there gaping at it, spouting painfully forced banalities about quantum science and medieval literature. It’s like a nerd pissing contest to see who paid the most attention in class today. By the time they come across the Cygnus, McCrae is babbling something about the ship's mission to “discover habitable life.”
Wait, what? Did she really say that? Yes, she did, and this is the point you first begin to consider the possibility that The Black Hole is, in fact, going to be a bad film.
Borgnine's character is supposed to be an embedded reporter (newspapers apparently still exist in the 22nd century) who never actually reports on anything. He just sort of hangs around in the background, complaining and making stupid suggestions, while contributing nothing to the expedition. This is because The Black Hole is the kind of story that requires someone to make a very specifically stupid decision at a critical point late in the film, artificially extending the runtime another 15 minutes. Tough guy Robert Forster cuts a dashing figure as commander of the Palomino, but he looks like he knows he should be in a different movie, throwing haymakers at Paul Newman on top of a water tower or something.
Anthony Perkins was much more talented than he’s often given credit for, but you’d never know it here. He looks half an hour out of major dental surgery, slack jawed and completely unable to emote, even as his character develops a major man-crush on Reinhardt. Yvette Mimieux is as pretty as her name, but is without question the weak link in the cast, from an acting standpoint. And as the only woman in a science fiction film, her only real purpose is to be The Psychic, always pestering everyone with her whiny psychic observations. This ability also inexplicably allows her to communicate telepathically with Vincent because shut up, it just does. And the saddest thing about that is that it's clearly just a lazy plot contrivance to get everyone out of trouble whenever the radio goes out.
All in all it’s a gross abuse of casting that turns a handful of respected actors - and Yvette Mimieux - into a boring waste of space. Some of the blame goes to Gary Nelson, who directed some really solid episodes of Gilligan’s Island, but is entirely out of his element here. I’m curious as to whether he even spoke to his actors at any point during filming, because the only person who seems remotely motivated here is Reinhardt, and he’s nuts! Everyone else looks confused and bewildered about everything they’re doing and saying, to the point where the most emotionally present members of the cast might be the robots.
Oh God...and speaking of robots....
I loved Vincent’s pluck and feared Maximilian’s hulking menace...when I was a kid. Now, I think Vincent is a pretentious asshole whose predilection for speaking in patronizing riddles makes me want to cut him into little pieces with a lightsaber. And speaking of Star Wars, The Black Hole came out two years after - and it’s not going out on a limb to say the influence is obvious. Vincent’s squat, round shape and spinning head are slightly reminiscent of R2-D2, and his snooty accent (courtesy of an uncredited Roddy McDowall) is essentially C3PO minus any form of human compassion. Slim Pickens (also uncredited) voices Bob, a battered cousin to Vincent who talks like a gas station attendant from rural Kentucky, because that’s just the kind of personality you want around when you’re stranded halfway across the galaxy.
I can only imagine if NASA sent a team of astronauts on a deep space mission accompanied by a condescending little bastard like Vincent, with his big stupid Mr. Potato Head eyes. I guarantee that ship comes back 600 pounds lighter. And while Maximilian the Deathbot is one of the film’s most memorable characters, he’s not enough to overcome everything else that’s wrong with it, particularly when it becomes painfully apparent that he’s made out of drywall or something. The film pointlessly devotes an entire subplot to these machines and their idiotic rivalry - no doubt meant to appeal to kids - but it adds nothing to the story, and it's jarringly intercut with the considerably more somber main plot.
And it's this relentless tonal dissonance that makes The Black Hole more grating than anything. Is this for kids or adults? Is it supposed to remind me of a George Lucas adventure or a Stanley Kubrick space opera? Is there really a deeper meaning to the story or is all that existential shop talk just smoke and mirrors? Am I supposed to laugh or be scared? The answer, of course, is YES! Disney was clearly very anxious to make a film kind-of-like-but-legally-distinct-from Star Wars. And they wanted it so bad, they appear to have taken an unused horror script about a mad scientist in a spooky castle, replacing the castle with a derelict spaceship and most of the monsters with silly robots, because someone heard that kids like silly robots that live in outer space.
The Black Hole boasted some cutting edge (for the time) special effects, a respectable cast and an audience ready and willing to be entertained. But it tries to emulate other, more successful films like Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey without understanding why those films worked as well as they did. It feels like a malformed, cynical cash grab designed to capitalize on whatever seemed most profitable about pop culture at the time. By the end, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a John Travolta and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders in a laser fight with the Muppets - on roller skates.
But you know what? It's not all as bad as it sounds. The first 30 minutes or so aren't terrible, and the question of what lies on the other side of a black hole is intriguing. But you can forget about exploring any of that; the black hole itself is little more than a hook that allowed Disney to set a rather ordinary Gothic thriller in space. The deadly vortex gets talked about a lot, and it's visible outside the ship for almost half the movie - merely a passive voyeur both to the hubris and vanity of a fictional madman, and that of a movie studio that vastly underestimated it's audience. The Black Hole is a better film than its reputation suggests, but it's still, sadly, a wasted opportunity of grand proportion.
I still can't help but harbor a soft spot for it, though. It made me want to explore both science fiction AND real science, and because of that I discovered a fascinating new world of actual knowledge and quality entertainment. So in revisiting one of the guilty pleasures of my youth, I guess you can say that at least in my case, Disney got their money's worth. I just hope the eternal gratitude of my inner child is worth $20 million.