Disney’s sci-fi opus The Black Hole was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. At least, it’s the first movie I remember seeing in a theater. I was only five-years-old at the time, and looking back now, can’t imagine why my mother would have chosen to endure something like this with me. Nonetheless, I have a pretty clear memory of sitting in a (long since closed) cinema in upstate New York watching a couple friendly robots flying around and laser-blasting their way through a giant spaceship while an evil red devil robot tried to slice and dice them to bits.

I know that I watched The Black Hole at least a couple more times during its later run on cable TV, but hadn’t seen it or given it a whole lot of thought since childhood. Honestly, I’d been a little afraid to revisit it as an adult. The film has a reputation as a silly cheesefest, and I didn’t want to tarnish whatever fond memories I retained of my first theatrical experience. I finally broke down after repeatedly encountering ads for Super 7’s recently-released “ReAction” toys based on the film in my social media feeds. Fortunately, having done so now, the movie’s not as bad as I feared. In fact, I actually enjoyed this rewatch more than I expected.

Title:	The Black Hole
Year of Release:	1979
Director:	Gary Nelson
Watched On:	Disney+
Also Available On:	Blu-ray Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

After the record-breaking grosses of Star Wars shook the entire filmmaking industry to its core in 1977, every studio in Hollywood rushed to cash-in with a big-budget sci-fi epic of its own. By 1979, a planned Star Trek sequel TV series got redirected to become a feature film instead, and even James Bond went to outer space. Disney’s entry in this genre was a mash-up of elements from Star Wars, Irwin Allen’s popular disaster movie spectacles of the era, and a lot of story ideas lifted from Jules Verne (whose 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had been adapted by the company to quite a bit of success a couple decades earlier).

About a century and a half in the future, the deep space exploration vessel U.S.S. Palomino encounters something very unexpected – a seemingly derelict spacecraft parked on the edge of a dangerous black hole. The ship, called the Cygnus, had gone missing twenty years earlier and the crew were all presumed dead after its captain refused orders to return to Earth. Intrigued, Capt. Dan Holland (Robert Forster) orders the Palomino to do a flyby inspection, only for his ship to sustain damage from the black hole’s intense gravity. Forced to dock with the larger craft in order to perform some repairs, the Palomino crew finds that the Cygnus is not deserted after all, but is rather fully operational and manned by scores of robots. One lone human survivor remains, the brilliant scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell).

Reinhardt claims that he sent the rest of the original crew home in a smaller vessel and is saddened to hear they never made it back. He chose to stay with the Cygnus to continue his research, and believes he’s finally made a breakthrough that will allow him to take the ship into – and through – the black hole to discover what lies on the other side. Holland and most of his team think the man has gone mad, but Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins) is dazzled by Reinhardt and wants to stay and explore the black hole with him. While waiting for the Palomino repairs to be completed, Holland and Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine), a nosy journalist inexplicably part of their mission, snoop around and learn that Reinhardt has been keeping some dangerous secrets, both about what really happened to his crew and about what he intends to do with those from the Palomino.

As a Disney production, The Black Hole was designed to be a family-friendly adventure suitable for young children to watch. The action is fairly tame and the violence non-graphic. Kids will immediately bond with a pair of adorable robots called V.I.N.CENT and BO.B (voiced by Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens) that look like floating trashcans with huge eyes yearning for their affection.

On the other hand, the movie adopts a surprisingly serious-minded tone and has much less of the silliness or joking around common to most Disney live-action films of the time. The story has some dark themes and even turns a little metaphysical. The evil robot called Maximilian is quite menacing, and I can tell you from experience that the imagery evoking hellfire and damnation at the end haunted me for years afterward. The Black Hole may be a kids’ movie, but was seemingly also made with the intent to challenge kids and ease them into more grown-up science fiction.

Undermining that ambition, unfortunately, the plot is disappointingly thin and its depiction of science often rather dumb. (In one of his crankier moods, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson declared it the most scientifically inaccurate movie ever.) Personally, I don’t think it’s really much worse in that regard than any typical Star Wars or Star Trek entry. The film makes at least a passable attempt to depict a zero-gravity environment in its early scenes before introducing the science magic of artificial gravity. Still, I can’t deny that a subplot about one of the scientists (played by Yvette Mimieux from George Pal’s 1950 The Time Machine) having an ESP connection to the robots is laughable, and the characters in general show no concern for the lack of air in outer space. Not even one spacesuit is ever shown in the movie, and a scene where another crewmember survives getting sucked out into the void with no ill effects is downright insulting to anyone who ever passed a 5th Grade science class – especially given that he’s pulled back inside a ship riddled with holes from a meteor shower.

Clearly, The Black Hole is not a film that can hold up to rigorous scrutiny. It’s also a little dull and suffers from the type of cheesiness that afflicted so much sci-fi in the 1970s. However, the model and miniature effects are all very good, the production design of the entire Cygnus ship and its interior sets is terrific, and – most of all – the movie is graced by an outstanding John Barry score that greatly elevates the material. Weaknesses of the script aside, the picture was made by many skilled craftspeople who put a lot of genuine artistry into it, at a time when that entailed a great deal more physical labor than just painting in whatever images you want on a computer.

I can’t pretend that The Black Hole will ever be one of my favorite science fiction movies, but it holds up better and is more entertaining than I expected. On the guilty pleasure scale, the pleasure outweighs the guilt. I don’t regret revisiting it at all, and may do so again in the future.

Video Streaming

Disney released The Black Hole on Blu-ray in a very limited fashion as an exclusive to the Disney Movie Club in 2019. Because I don’t own that disc, I streamed the film from Disney+ instead. I assume both versions stem from the same source. The high-def transfer is kind of a mixed bag, but I can’t be certain how much of that is the fault of the original photography or production, as opposed to a video mastering issue.

As a special effects-heavy movie from the late 1970s, The Black Hole is inundated with optical composites that, back in the analog days, resulted in a softer picture and increased grain. These shots comprise a significant amount of screen time, and are frequently soft to the point of looking out of focus. Productions with enough time or budget might have filmed such scenes on larger 65mm stock in order to retain more quality through the duping process, but as far as I’m aware, The Black Hole was shot on regular 35mm end-to-end. Short of locating all the original individual effects elements (if they still exist) and reconstructing the scenes digitally, not much can be done to fix the softness issue now. I doubt this particular movie would ever sell enough copies to justify such an expense or effort.

Even in scenes without any effects work, the 2.35:1 image is only moderately sharp. However, it’s detailed enough to expose the wires holding up the V.I.N.CENT and BO.B robots in a few scenes. Contrast and colors also look slightly washed-out. A remaster with a new 4K scan might be able to pull a small bit of extra quality out of this, but the worst of its issues are endemic to the source materials available. This movie is simply a product of its time.

The Black Hole played theatrically in Dolby Stereo. Current home video versions were remixed into 5.1 format. The John Barry score is the star of the show here. (This was one of the last major mainstream movies to open with an extended overture over a black screen before the credits.) Music is presented with pretty good breadth and fidelity, as well as a decent amount of bass. In other respects, the soundtrack has some rumbly rocket booms and crisp laser blasts, though dialogue is a little soft in the mix and a big meteor storm at the end sounds disappointingly weak. Certain sound effects and pieces of dialogue are steered directionally across the front soundstage. Activity in the rear surrounds is more subtle but still effective at times.