From the safe: As the streaming area continues to grow, more and more extensive studio catalogs are becoming available. This includes lost and forgotten jewels, bad-it-good duds, and just plain weird bits of film history. And you probably won’t find them waiting for streamers to put them in front of you. In From the Vault, Android Authority aims to rescue these titles from the algorithm graveyard and help you get more out of your streaming subscriptions.
The year is 1979. Two years after the great success of Star Wars. Four years after Jaws ushered in the summer blockbuster era. In a new film, a small space crew makes a detour from their trip home to investigate a mysterious phenomenon. What begins as a well-intentioned rescue attempt soon leads to the crew fighting dark forces in order to get home safely.
I’m not talking about alien. I am describing Walt Disney’s largely forgotten sci-fi feature, The Black Hole, among the many library titles available on Disney Plus.
The Black Hole received Oscar nominations for cinematography and visual effects, but received mixed to negative reviews. Overall, critics dismissed it as a copy of better films that get stuck with a weak script and a generally boring plot.
And yet, on review, The Black Hole is certainly an interesting cultural artifact. It’s dynamic and original enough to at least grab your attention.
Nowhere near as important as Alien, it includes the markers of a genre changing in a way that is worth its term, and it’s a cut above many other titles on Disney Plus.
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Journey to the black hole
Directed by Gary Nelson and with a terrific score by John Barry, The Black Hole jumps straight into the action in scene 1.
The USS Palomino makes a detour from its return to Earth when it encounters a black hole and an abandoned ship believed lost 20 years earlier. The Palomino withstands damage from the nearby black hole and finds the famous Dr. Hans Reinhardt on board the otherwise abandoned ship – abandoned except for Reinhardt’s army of strangely lifelike robots.
Reinhardt is not what he appears to be, and while the crew works to fix their own ship, they aid the doctor in his attempt to fly through the black hole, but they begin to uncover dark secrets around his decades-long absence.
The film features a stacked cast. Robert Forster (Medium Cool, Jackie Brown) plays the ship’s captain, and his crew includes horror icon Anthony Perkins (Psycho) and Ernest Borgnine (The Poseidon Adventure, The Wild Bunch). And among the robots are actors Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens, both of whom do not credit their voices.
Whatever was holding the black hole back, it certainly wasn’t the premise or the talented people on screen.
Not entirely Alien, not entirely Star Wars
The black hole combines a bright campiness with darker subjects in a compelling – if sometimes awkward – way, and that’s one of the main points in its favor. It’s not a swashbuckling space opera like Star Wars, though it leans in that direction with its laser-shooting droids. And it’s not a grim slasher in space like Alien, but it certainly goes to some haunting places, with the mad doctor Hans Reinhardt oscillating somewhere between Victor Frankenstein and Colonel Walter Kurtz (check that out, Apocalypse Now came out in 1979 too!) .
When you see it now, The Black Hole looks like it was trying to turn a last-minute carefree adventure into a haunted tale. Just as Daredevil of 2003 was plagued by a need for lightness after the success of Spider-Man the previous year, The Black Hole plays much like an attempted Star Wars clone like a movie desperately trying to oppose it .
When The Black Hole allows it to get dark, it is full of powerful, awe-inspiring imagery.
Outside of crazy action scenes, the film has some pretty strong imagery when it takes itself to be transported into the dark. Robots mourning their dead, the tortured faces of Reinhardt’s experiments and the, uh, not quite so precise fiery hell landscape in the center of the eponymous black hole are absolutely impressive.
The film reaches moments of true grandeur, despite the obvious extra fat that could have been trimmed here and there.
A little dark for Disney
The darker sides of The Black Hole make it a delightful work to revisit. The film is bankable “IP” to use Disney’s corporate language. But that darkness also makes it harder for the PG-focused House of Mouse to argue.
Recognizing the movie’s potential, Disney attempted a remake in 2009, with Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski at the helm. Perhaps they recognized the similarities between The Black Hole and Alien because Disney commissioned Jon Spaihts, who previously wrote the alien prequel Prometheus, to write a screenplay in 2013.
For better or for worse, the project never got off the ground and was deemed too dark for Disney. Spaihts told Slashfilm in 2016 that he loved working on the script, but “It sits uncomfortably in Disney’s world as a dark epic, and Disney is in a very colorful place … It was very true to the original, but in every way clever The first film was silly, I hope. “
There is much to be done, and rumors suggest Disney is still working on a reboot, with Pacific Rim: Uprising writer Emily Carmichael attached. Who knows where the project could end?
Caught between two worlds
It’s easy to think of film history as a sequence of before and after. Action before and after the appearance of the sound. Horror before and after Psycho. Science fiction before and after Star Wars. 3D before and after avatar.
But the norms that we take for granted have not been fully developed. Alien didn’t suddenly change all of science fiction or introduce horror into science fiction for the first time. It was a crucial film without a doubt, but it also exists in a long spectrum of changes.
The black hole reveals some of the worse growing pains on the spectrum. It feels just like a descendant of Forbidden Planet and Buck Rogers like a prelude to Blade Runner and Event Horizon.
As such, it feels fascinatingly trapped between two worlds.
“Forgotten classic” may be a series, but The Black Hole is a notable entry in the science fiction pantheon. One you probably won’t be looking for (or even finding anywhere) without having streaming catalogs on hand.