The Black Hole

[baumer]

Discuss

[IndustriousAngel]

One of "those" Disney films (like Dragonslayer) that you didn't expect from the Mouse.

It's not a perfect film - it suffers from some questionable design and/or story decisions. VINCENT and BOB - clearly inspired by R2D2 and C3PO - are offered as comic relief but stand out like sore thumbs in their big-eyed Disneyness. The stupid thing about them is that "The Black Hole" is never never never a children's film. It's far more frightening than Star Wars; children will be seriously overstrained by it. And the (kind of) open ending is not very satisfying either, in Reinhard's case even terrifying.

Another design problem: The Palomino. Just doesn't compute.

Which leads us to the highlights (why the film still earns a B from me):

- The cast. Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, Maximilian Schell ...

- The story: Quite original as far as SF stories go. No war, no space battles, no aliens, but subtle horror.

- And of course: The Cygnus. One of the immortal space ship designs, up there with the Millenium Falcon and the Star Destroyer and the Discovery (from 2001). They don't build them like this anymore. (Yes, they had to bulid these things in '79 ... the big Cygnus model was about 4 meters long). The image of the lit-up Cygnus in front of the galaxy is really visionary, today as much as then: