If you want to learn anything about black holes don't bother going to see this picture but if all you're after is an occasionally entertaining imitation of Star Wars mixed with some watered-down 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and a dash of Disney-style religion then The Black Hole will be right up your cosmological alley. Personally the last thing I wanted to see was yet another Star Wars imitation so I was less than impressed...
The publicity build-up for this picture has been huge by Disney's usual standards. "The most expensive and ambitious Disney film of all time!" "Five years in the making!" "A budget of over £10,000,000!" "One of the film world's most unique productions ever!" And along with the publicity came a shroud of secrecy, mainly centering on the film's climax. Apparently it was so audacious, so mind-boggling, that the leading players weren't even permitted to know about it and the final pages were removed from their scripts. Gosh! I said to myself, always a sucker for this type of publicity hype, the ending must be really something! Well, it's something alright...
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The special effects, as you might expect from the Disney studio, are generally of a very high standard, though occasionally the wires holding up the robots, and the humans, are all too visible on screen. The sequences at the beginning of the picture where the crew of the first ship encounter both the black hole and the USS Cygnus are very impressive. At first the Cygnus, which resembles a vast Victorian glasshouse, is in darkness but then it comes to life in a blaze of light that is quite breath-taking. The effects in Star Trek may have cost more but lack such moments of imagination and style. The general break-up of the Cygnus at the end of the film is also spectacular, in particular one brief scene where a huge glowing meteor rolls through the interior of the ship like a giant red snowball while tiny human figures can be seen scurrying away in front of it. (Yes, I know . . . it wouldn't be glowing because there wouldn't be any oxygen and all the air would have shot out through the huge hole it made on the way in, thus asphyxiating the humans instantly, but I wasn't going to mention that.)
But for all its undoubted spectacle The Black Hole is fundamentally a disappointment. Buried within it somewhere is a serious picture with an adult theme but only fragments of it remain — the Disney people decided to play it safe and take the easy way out, eschewing originality for warmed-over scenes from Star Wars and sure-fire laughs from the "funny" robots. You can't, however, have it both ways and hope to be successful; you can't jump from metaphysics to slapstick comedy and then back again and expect your audience to follow you... and so The Black Hole ends up an uneasy mixture of two opposing styles, with the result that the various parts add up to a rather bleak whole (sorry).
Still, on the whole (sorry again, I can't help it), I found it much more fun than the slow and portentous Star Trek, plus the fact that it's thirty minutes shorter with a running time of only 97 minutes. In these days of long, long movies that's quite an asset!
