Wenchwatches: The Black Hole (1979)

Now, we've watched The Black Hole (1979) before, but lately I've been turning many of these threads into blog posts, and it often gives me an opportunity to practice my writing.

Besides, I loved this film as a kid and I need that after this last week.

Let's watch!

Nerdy kid me loved the CGI-esque intro with the wireframe of the fabric of spacetime and, of course, the titular Black Hole. The OCR text was a nice touch too, reminding me of another favorite of mine: Earth Star Voyager. We'll see yet another connection between this film and that mini series later.

The sets in this film are delicious. Unlike the blinding, Apple Store-esque bridge of Star Trek (2009), The Black Hole lasys at the crossroads of 70s Sci-Fi design, nearly 80s tech, and a Disney budget. Even the minuscule Palomino set is stuffed with CRTs, blinkenlights, and large 7-segment displays. On first watch, it's a glorious thing to behold. On repeated rewatchings, however, the effect does dull a bit, as the lack of any sort of though as to use or intention becomes obvious. This isn't a mark against the film, of course. Few would watch this film more than once, and certainly not the probably dozens of times I've seen it. 

I always appreciate when a sci-fi set looks like it's a workplace rather than a jewelry store. It adds a note of realism through chunkiness, clutter, and visual complexity.

There's a scene early in this film which was impressed upon me since I was little.

The small ship our characters travel in, the Palomino, is coming apart as it descends into the gravity well of the black hole. Their robotic crew member Vincent is ordered outside to secure a broken hatch. His tether breaks in the attempt, and the young upstart crewmember, Charlie, wants to leave his post to go retrieve him.

The captain orders him down:

"Stay at your post Charlie."
"What the hell are you made of? What if it was one of us out there?"
"Vincent is one of us."

This, combined with so many other non-human and synthetic people in other popular SF impressed upon me a broader sense of humanization (for lack of a better word). One, for better or worse, I often forget is not a common perspective. People need not be human to be people to me.

This isn't the first time I've mentioned Earth Star Voyager, and it will likely not be the last. A mini series originally appearing on The Wonderful World of Disney, I did rewatch it over several evenings for an earlier Wenchwatches. That was before I started turning my social media threads into blog posts, however, so I cannot link to my previous review here. Needless to say, it wasn't awful, perhaps a bit unremarkable, but for some reason the execs at Disney utterly hated the film. From what I've read, they did everything they could to stop the series from being made, short of actually breaking contract. As a result, it starred no one, had cheap sets, and was completely buried going forward. So much so, the series not only never saw a DVD release outside of German, pirated copies are easy to find and ignored by the org's lawyers. 

The reuse of Epcot for key scenes comes as no surprise. In the 80s, Epcot was new. It's truss construction makes it a nature fit for many, many of Disney's sci-fi productions. No wonder why the two are so connected in my mind.

One thing that you pick up when you watch a lot of cheesy, often made for TV sci-fi, is you can tell when the director actually has a eye for the genre. Sci-fi is an expensive genre to film, as the costumes are complicated and non-standard, the sets are all bespoke builds, and that doesn't even begin to mention the effects. As such, many less budgeted productions often can look laughably cheesy. This is often lampooned in satirical pieces like Galaxy Quest or even the episode Wormhole X-Treme! from Stargate SG1.

I've often said that "good writing makes up for a lot" when it comes to films. As we'll see below, there's actually quite a bit of good writing in The Black Hole.

But what can really elevate the film? Lighting.

The filmmaker understands how to use light, and more importantly here, when not to use it. Blasting a cheap set with full lighting can really make the failings stand out. Likewise, keeping it all in shadow can give the audience nothing to latch on to, leaving it feeling murky and undefined. In The Black Hole, light is used strategically and with great consideration. The Black Hole is actually a rather dark and shadowy visual experience compared to other Disney films or even SF in general at the time. Shadow is a cheap and effective way to make a set look much, much more interesting to the eye despite it's cheapness. The filmmaker knew this well and employed it expertly. This helps to give the sets a sense of depth and detail even when they remain basic. 

Use of lighting extends beyond illuminating the sets. It can also be effectively used on the cast as well.

It's clear by the second act this film has a surprising amount of special effects, including model work and puppetry. I've already talked about the sets, but the model work also impresses. Even in 2025, the models feel convincingly real. They move and act as you might expect of space ships.

What's odd, however, is the compositing. The compositing in The Black Hole...sucks. A lot of 80s films which used chroma-key technology of the time all had this odd outline effect which smudged the lines around the edges. The Palomino in particular, had several bits of noticeably bad compositing. It's no where near as bad as say, Falcor from The Never Ending Story, but it still feels like a tech demo.

In fact, that's what a lot of The Black Hole feels like. This isn't a masterpiece of writing, or acting, or even filmmaking. Oh sure, it's competent, even good in places, but primarily this film is meant as a research project for Disney's effects department. A sci-Fi is the perfect opportunity for that, and if Disney gets a serviceable film out of it, why not?

That's the weakest part of The Black Hole, figuring out just who in the Universe this film is for. The occasional physical humor from the robotic characters suggests something for younger viewers. This is held in contradiction to the serious and downright cerebral tone of the rest of the writing.

It's not until Reinhardt's little speech on his mission to traverse the Black Hole that you realize just what this film is doing: It's Space Moby Dick. Reinhardt isn't chasing a whale, but rather a seemingly impossible frontier of scientific understanding. Cribbing notes from classic literature is a old, old technique used throughout science fiction. Star Trek The Next Generation relied on this multiple times to imbue an otherwise pulp work with class and nuance.

Here, it serves to make Reinhardt a much more threatening character. He's not evil per se, but so coolly dedicated to his Einstein-Rosen bridge expedition that he leaves all other concerns behind. Morality, empathy, ethics, mean nothing to him. This malevolence becomes more and more apparent as the third act gets started. The black hole isn't just a scientific phenomena in this film, but a metaphor for lines one should not cross. It's held up a an ultimate unknown, "the mind of God", or even eternal life.

So...this...is...a...kid's...film? The cerebral tone of this film, combined with the full orchestral suite of music (some quite good to be honest), feels like a more serious work aimed at adults. Yet the occasional physical humor from the robotic characters says otherwise. It gets even more confusing when the horror is revealed of what happened to the Cygnus' crew. I can only assume that the directorial intent of the film was a serious work for adults, but Disney wanted a tween or teen film, resulting in the muddled feeling.

It's no wonder why this film appealed to nearly no one except a dork such as myself raised on similarly cerebral pieces of pop-SF.

It's in the latter part of the 3rd act the writing, and indeed, much of the film breaks down. The tone dramatically shifts at the trough of despair -- the bottom of The Hero's Journey -- and becomes much more a kid's action flick once more.

On this rewatch, I'm noticing much of that action is hamstrung by costuming choices. Much of Reinhardt's army is a series of sentry robots. These robots are rather obviously, actors with non-speaking roles in suits. The suits work for the most part, but they limit the actor's ability to move and completely obscure their ability to see. When combined with the fact that the robotic characters of Vincent, Bob, and Maximilian enter the fray, the result is stiff and uninteresting fight choreography.

Don't get me wrong, it is damn enjoyable the way the robot sentries explode into pieces in this film, showing off guts of ruined circuitry, but the film would have benefited from more dynamic acting if it wanted to pull off action.

And that's really the problem here. The acting...just isn't great here. Aside from Reinhardt (Snell), the only other actor with name recognition is the minor character played by Ernest Borgnine. Yeah, that guy. If the film had kept to the 50's era of hyper-restrained characters, and didn't try to go for action, it might have worked. It's easier for a poor actor to hide their deficiencies in such a situation. The pivot to action, however, makes their weaknesses painfully apparent.

That said, Snell *does* get a marvelous death scene in The Black Hole. In fact, it's a death scene that stuck with me for my entire life. Pinned under an enormous display, he begs the crew for help. The crew, having been forcibly turned into cyborgs by Reinhardt, ignore his pleas. Later, as the bridge collapses, he thinks, "All light", quoting scripture.

It's not just the acting that falls apart in the latter half of the third. It's also the budget. It feels the cheapest part of the entire film. The Cygnus model is destroyed in several glorious shots until...the cheapness becomes painfully apparent. The remains of the ship replaced with shaking plastic sheeting held together with flimsy frames and shook by fans and off-camera grips.

You can tell that this part was where the filmmaker just...didn't care. It smacks of studio interference and "let's just get this over with." It doesn't really pick up again until after the Palomino crew board the probe ship and traverse the event horizon themselves.

So. The fourth act.

Let's talk about it.

It's hard not to see a bit of 2001 in this, especially as we enter into a liminal space through a close up of Kate's eyes. There's where the similarity ends, however. In an unfortunately memeable sequence (much like the "gorn with the wind" meme), a much aged Reinhardt and Maximilian merge, creating a new hybrid being.

A new ruler, over a barren and fiery hellscape. As the camera pans away, we see scores of cloaked figures shuffling past. For years, I had only had a poor SD copy of this film from recorded from broadcast on VHS. In my DVD copy, however, we're given additional detail. The cloaked figures aren't faceless, but are a procession of grinning skulls. As a child, this sequence would have had the ability to terrify if my copy had been any better than it was.

On this rewatch, it also occurs to me that this sequence gives Reinhardt what he truly wanted: Immortality, freedom from the empathy and ethics of humanity to pursue all that he desires.

To be a god, even if only to rule in hell.

The sequence would have been damning, a dire pronouncement of those who'd so willingly sacrifice sentient beings for the sake of his drive and curiosity. To this day, what happens next has always felt like a concession. 

Following the hellscape, the scene shifts blueward and we see Reinhardt's "spirit" flying through a crystalline archway to a blinding light. Perhaps instead, separated from ambition and drive, Reinhardt's tired and long ignored soul was finally free to rejoin the Universe.

Meanwhile, our travelers pass through a white hole, exiting our Universe and entering a new one. We see the probe ship continue toward what appears to be a planet. Triumphant music plays, and the credits roll.

I love the first half of this film. The slow, deliberate pacing, the allegorical elements, the cerebralness of it, to say nothing of the effects work. The third act, however, is the weakest of the entire film, and one where typically a film is meant to shine the brightest. Unfortunately, shackled with the technology of the era and the choices of its costume work hamper it significantly. The fight scenes are tepid and uninteresting, as stiff as the robot sentries.

The writing does make up for a lot here, and I greatly appreciate how the filmmaker was trying to make a bigger film than the studio intended. You can see them trying to make another 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), but being unable to pull it off. Nevertheless, I feel the lesson of Reinhardt's character is to never let the pursuit of anything, no matter how noble on paper, to overcome our respect and reverence for, as the film calls it, "intelligent life".