Black Hole

I remember watching The Black Hole as a youth in a local movie theater. The story was about the crew of the Palomino that discovers the Cygnus, a ship once thought lost, near the event horizon of a black hole. As it turns out, the Cygnus is run by a madman, named Reinhardt. He has a right hand man, which is a robot, named Maximillian. The rest of his crew is (apparently) robots, his crew (allegedly) having abandoned him.

The film was made two years after Star Wars, and was Disney's response. Wow, does this film look old compared to Star Wars. You have Anthony Perkins (of Psycho), Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster (Baretta). There are two robots, Vincent and Bob, that are analogous to C3PO and R2-D2. Although the film was made in 1979, the look of the film screams 1960s. The music is slightly bizarre sounding very much like James Bond's Goldfinger, which is not surprising since both were composed by John Barry.

The music also sounds a bit like Pink Panther, with the piano riff, which seems oddly out of place.

The quality of special effects, apparently well-note at the time, really doesn't hold up at all, especially, the lasers and the thrusters, which Star Wars, after all these years, still looks reasonably good. The meteors also look pretty bad. What looks good is the Cygnus itself, which is large and ponderous, but at least doesn't look like Star Wars ships.

The movie ends pretty surreal, with the crew forced to go into the black hole, and a scene that echoes a bit of 2001. Pretty unusual for a Disney film, but perhaps people were still taking their cues more from 2001 than Star Wars.

The pacing, the story, of all of it seems pretty off, despite the money spent on it. At least, Star Trek, which used (I believe) ILM for its special effects and came out the same year still looks pretty good from special effects. That, too, seemed inspired from 2001, and I think, despite its pacing, holds up pretty well even 30 years after its release.