In... Through... and Beyond.
1. Okay, so the thing with THE BLACK HOLE is that it's a movie that doesn't really work. It never did, and I realized that even before going to see it on Sunday with Rob, projected in 35mm at the New Beverly. I haven't seen a print of it since I was 7, and it was in national release. The movie is not like OUT OF SIGHT or some movie that is actually great that just didn't catch on. But like so many other weird-assed B-pictures I tend to get deeply attracted to, there are elements in it that actually are kind of breathtaking, and tangible flashes of brilliance.
2. Of course, the most extreme example of the extreme flashes-of-brilliance versus laughable-crap movies is probably EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, which everyone is probably sick to death of hearing me talk about at this point. But I've never seen a movie that careens from absolute genius to total fucking batshit in such short amounts of time, kind of like watching a tractor trailer do a 180 and floor it in the opposite direction within a space of seven seconds. It's a quality yo-yo. But where EXORCIST II has about 10% brilliant to 90% gloriously awful, I'd say THE BLACK HOLE is about a fifty-fifty split.
3. The main problem with this movie, which from what I gather reflected the state of the Walt Disney Company circa 1977-1979 fairly accurately, is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. It is at heart a nasty, brooding, dark sci-fi movie about a mad scientist in space who (SPOILERS!) commits mass lobotomization/slavery of his crew, builds an army of lethal robots and in his spare time plans on shooting his spacecraft through a nearby black hole because he thinks it'll get him Ultimate Knowledge and Eternal Life. The black hole is, of course, a total MacGuffin, which is a problem later. Enter The Good Guys, a 5 person crew (and one plucky robot) who gets their craft totally messed up by the Black Hole, and then has to land on Mad Scientist's ship for repairs. Eventually they learn that evil Captain Reinhart is bonkers, and they run around a lot and have a bunch of space laser fighting with his robots. That not being enough, a meteor storm happens near the end blowing up half the ship and creating climactic chaos (during which time, laws of physics go right out the window).
So it's really the darkest, nastiest parts of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, but it also wants to be STAR WARS and be all kid-friendly with cute talkative robots (voiced by Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickens, both unbilled and both of whom have more lines than some of the leads). So in 1979, the movie didn't really work for anybody: kids were freaked that main characters die in gruesome ways and the overall tone is oppressive and super-dark, teens were put off by robot idiocy and general cheesiness, and everybody was flummoxed by the indecipherable, some might say lunk-headed, ending.
4. But the parts of THE BLACK HOLE that really work-- and I'm thinking particularly of the midpoint reveal sequence that kicks off the entire second half-- are the darkest, eeriest, and nastiest parts.
This sequence in the middle of the movie is, I think, why I was obsessed with this movie as a kid. Basically (SPOILERS AGAIN), plucky old robot Slim Pickens tells plucky new robot Roddy McDowell The Big Evil Truth Behind The Ship, which is, the Mad Scientist Reinhardt has a God complex and enslaved and lobotomized his crew. (Why Reinhardt didn't just deactivate this stupid robot is not something you should consider.) It's established early on that the Roddy robot can communicate with Dr. Kate MacCrae (Yvette Mimieux) via ESP. So what happens is Roddy robot is ordered to tell Kate-- who is with Evil Scientist and Hapless Wannabe Scientist Anthony Perkins in the main control tower-- the Real Truth and get the hell out of there.
Wordlessly, she gets the message-- ALL THESE MASKED ROBOTS AROUND YOU ARE REALLY LOBOTOMIZED CREW MEMBERS. She gasps, whirls around and looks with new eyes. The camera switches angles. You can see the dawning horror on her face.
It's a no-shit totally fantastic moment, and it's burned in my memory.
Then it just gets better. She tries to warn Wannabe Anthony Perkins to get out of there with her. Madman Reinhardt corners her and asks what her deal is, and she can barely hold it together. (It doesn't help that her Dad was also on the ship years ago, and killed, by Reinhardt.) Perkins then goes to one of the "robots" and takes off the face mask, where it is revealed, in FUCKING CLOSE-UP, a decimated human face, who makes this GASP DIRECTLY IN THE CAMERA.
Total fucking horror.
And then Perkins gets BRUTALLY CHOPPED UP by an evil red robot, and dumped onto some electrical cables.
Talk about raising the midpoint stakes. "Dr. Durant is dead," said Roddy robot. I remember being seven and being like... what... DEAD? Like he's DEAD? Can they DO that? This wasn't STAR WARS, I thought even then. This is a SCARY movie.
5. And it wanted to be. And it should have been. But I can only imagine some nervous executive explained they'd sell more action figures if there was, well, action. So throughout the second half of the movie, there are assorted laser fights (which I remember being a lot more exciting as a kid) and a couple of close calls with meteors that-- deus ex machina alert-- just come the hell out of nowhere to add to the chaos. (This bugs me-- they could have added ONE LINE of dialogue sometime early on saying "oh we really need to go into the black hole or get out of our current position before that meteor shower is expected to hit us"... but no.)
But even with the space fights and meteors, the best stuff is the darkest, most creepy stuff. The iconic shot of the gigantic meteor silhouetting the crew rolling toward them (pre-RAIDERS) as they run across a bridge, just before it destroys the bridge. A vaccuum that almost sucks them into space in a greenhouse that suddenly turns blue and freezing. A moment in which All Seems Lost and their ship is blown apart (without most of them on it, at least).
The thing about this movie is it really seems to communicate how COLD and EMPTY and VAST space is, just before it throws that whole atmospheric pressure thing away toward the end (and Joseph Bottoms inexplicably flies to the hole, to be rescued at the last second by Roddy robot.)
6. And the ending is kind of a disaster. If you look up in the dictionary the phrase "painted into a corner" you may as well see the key art for this movie. For 80 minutes we hear about how AWESOME and TERRIFYING black holes are, and how this one is a MONSTER and the BIGGEST ONE EVER. And just at the end, what's left of The Good Guys are in a pre-programmed ship that FLIES STRAIGHT IN. So, yeah, the audience is prepped, ready to be BLOWN THE HELL AWAY BY WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE IN THIS BLACK HOLE.
The answer is: not a whole lot. Which sucks.
It's as if they couldn't possibly figure out what the Black Hole was supposed to represent. You literally could do anything once they fly in there, and they decide to show Hell (fires and slaves and evil Reinhardt trapped inside his robot) and the cheesiest heaven ever, denoted by (literally) a tin foil tunnel and a wire with white cloth flying behind it to denote an "angel".
Even at seven, I was like: that ending SUCKED.
With good narrative construction, your ending should answer the questions raised in the movie in an unexpected and satisfying way. When Luke blows up the Death Star, he does so by trusting the Force. It is because of this that the ending works so well-- because the entire movie really is about whether or not Luke is going to trust that he's special, that he has a destiny, that he's protected and guided by faith (or The Force). When he does, he prevails.
Nobody in THE BLACK HOLE really has a conflict to resolve. Which is a shame, because it'd be a pretty easy thing to set up at the top of the movie. So instead, we're left with some chintzy quasi-religious heaven/hell bullshit. Does it represent death? Does it represent Truth? Does it represent Immortality? You could have set up anything-- absolutely fucking anything-- and paid it off here, and yet nobody in the Script Imagineering Department of Disney circa 1978 seemed to get that if they were gonna fly through THE BIGGEST BLACK HOLE EVER that it should, ya know, mean something to its characters. Blowing up the shark in JAWS? Means something. Death Star? Means something. Rocky in the big match sure as heck means something. But there is no conflict to get resolved, no deeper meaning. (For an interesting antithesis to this, check out Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE.)
So... THE BLACK HOLE is death? Somebody should have thought about this. Or: they shouldn't have fucking gone through it.
7. But I must have seen this film upwards of 70 times, on Betamax, as a kid. I know the pan and scan version far better than the "real" version. For whatever reason-- probably the dark weirdness of it-- the film really spoke to me and still kind of does. I had the action figures, and I was really into the fact that this entire cutesy movie with space fighting is all happening on the PRECIPICE OF TOTAL DEATH, that this big fucking black hole was like two minutes away from them, and that if anything went wrong, you'd get sucked in and never heard from again.
8. When I was five, my family had a very small house in Avalon, NJ. We were on one of the inlets of a bay there-- I couldn't tell you where, and our place had a small dark wood dock out back. I remember the dock being quite high over the water and the water beneath it was dark green, almost like ink. My mom used to tell us not to go too close to the edge because the water was quite deep there (like five feet! I remember thinking how TALL that was). One day, a green towel with a picture of a hotel on it, which had been draped over part of the dock, fell into the water. I watched it sink beneath the surface and disappear. The adults ran around frenzied, as I recall, and somebody jumped in to try to retrieve the towel. They dove under again and again and couldn't find it. It was theorized that there were Currents under the water that pulled the towel out into the ocean.
And I just remember, like it was yesterday, looking at that placid, inky water. And thinking if I jumped into that, I'd be immediately sucked under and nobody would ever hear from me again. It terrified me. I barely went on the dock at all after that. That place almost certainly doesn't exist any more. But it's never completely left my mind.