The Black Hole (1979)

 

100 best Science Fiction films

Popular Mechanics list

#94. The Black Hole (1979)

 

"There is an inexorable force in the cosmos where time and space converge. A place beyond man's vision ... but not his reach."
-- from the trailer

 

Introduction:

 

This is among the worst films ever made that deservers high recommendation. Unlike “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (1959) it’s not “so bad it’s good,” because it is often very, very, good, except when it’s bad which is an awful lot of the time. It was one of those projects that started to do something before the studio, in this case Disney, was fully sure what that “something” was supposed to be, and as public taste kept changing while it lingered in Development Hell, the studio kept changing its mind about what the vital “something” was and thereby kept going farther-and-farther astray. The project was kept alive by the studio’s investment in its concept art, so even though they didn’t know what they were doing, they were obsessed with their knowledge that they knew what it would look like.

 

Part one: Bad stuff first.

 

The film opens and ends well, it’s mostly the middle that’s the problem. As Critic Larry Vitacco perceptively put it, “‘The Black Hole’ may look like 20 million bucks, but its scenario is worth about 20 cents.”

 

Often referred to as a “Star Wars” (1977) rip-off, its story is, in-fact, Light-Years distant. Though impossible to recognize now, it was originally intended as a “Poseidon Adventure” (1972) rip-off. What we eventually got was a clumsy train-wreck that was mostly, as Actor Anthony Perkins put it, a "sort of a Captain Nemo in Space thing." He was referring to “Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (1954), perhaps Disney’s best SF movie and that older film had baring on how this production evolved.

 

The film had a more-than-capable Director, Gary Nelson, who seems to have lost his way. A talented cast, including  the above-mentioned Perkins, Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Ernest Borgnine,  Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens, who are mostly given way too little to do and some were visibly resentful about being there.

 

When the project first emerged, Disney was suffering and its leading Producer (soon-to-be-CEO) Ron Miller, was on a rebranding mission. "Lately a lot of teenagers and young adults have stayed away from Disney films. They consider it kiddie material. Well, ‘The Black Hole’ is not a kiddie film. We want to let people know that this is a different kind of movie than they're used to seeing from us."

 

What he failed to mention is that their Family films, which had given us landmark after landmark starting with their first live-action feature, “Treasure Island” (1950), had started to kinda suck, and if they weren’t so sucky, Disney wouldn’t have needed to rebrand, and after rebranding, if you’re still sucky, you still have the same problem.

 

This project, originally titled, “Space Station 1,” was supposed to be a break-away from dreck like “World’s Greatest Dad” (1972), “World’s Greatest Athlete” (1973), “The Strongest Man in the World” (1975), etc. Initially they wanted to cash in on the epic Disaster Movie cycle that “The Poseidon Adventure” triggered, featuring impressive FX and all-star entourage Casts. The Writing team of Bob Barbash and Richard Landau approached Disney in 1974 with the idea of a Space Station filled with big-name Actors that was struck by "Supernova Wave" and the Cast didn’t know how to escape and get back to Earth.

 

After the project changed hands several times, Disaster Movies lost their financial cache, and “Star Wars” proved super-popular, and so the story, well, became a little bit different. The first Executive Producer, Winston Hibler, changed the original story by introducing the Black Hole, but then he promptly died. The next one, Miller, completely ditched the original screenplay. By the time it was released, eight Screenwriters had been employed (more still if you include how the FX team dreamed up the ending, I’ll get to that), but only Barbash, Landau and Jeb Rosebrook got credited. There were at least three Directors assigned at different points, and the final one, Nelson, didn’t like the script and initially passed on the project, “It’s not for me. I don't like it. It’s not very good.” But Miller persisted, “He said, ‘Would you like to meet with Peter Ellenshaw, our production designer and head of the matte department? He’s done some renderings of some of the spaceships and things like that.’” So, Nelson met with Ellenshaw and “he took me up to his office and showed me these incredible paintings that he had done for the movie, and I fell in love with them. And I said, ‘Well shit, if this is what it's going to be like, count me in.’”

 

Nelson immediately demanded yet another script over-haul; I’m not sure which of the many over-halls this one represented[rm1] , but I do know it radically reduced the number of characters.

 

The story we ultimately got opened in the year 2130, with the U.S.S. Palomino is returning after a long, and largely uneventful, Deep Space mission. Its crew is comprised of Captain Dan Holland (Forester), the Hero-guy; Lieutenant Charlie Pize (Joseph Bottoms), who basically just stands around being handsome; Dr. Alex Durant (Perkins), an Astrophysicist with strong, but naive, Religious convictions; Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux), the token female, an Astro-Geophysicist who has ESP abilities that contribute very little to the story; V.I.N.CENT (McDowell), a shortened version of Vital Information Necessary CENTralized, a cute Robot who represents the film’s most overt “Star Wars” reference; and Harry Booth (Borgnine), a journalist who, because he’s the only one who isn’t a real Astronaut, proves to be a problem.

 

By accident, they find the massive Black Hole, Light Years away, were being consumed by it?), and orbiting near the Black Hole, seemingly abandoned, the U.S.S. Cygnus. It’s a pretty famous lost ship, and more importantly, Kate’s missing father was part of the crew.

 

Well, it’s not abandoned; one person is still alive, Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Schell), as well as a small army of robots. Hans is our Captain Nemo character, and he’s keeping secrets, most of which you can figure out by watching the trailer. Hans is obsessed with traveling through the Black Hole and exploring another Universe. When his crew wisely said, “No,” he murdered them all and turned them into Robot/Zombies (nice touch, the Robot/Zombies have mirror-masks, so when crazed narcissist, Hans, looks at them, he sees only his own reflection staring back).

 

These Robot/Zombies are near-mindless, but there are other Robots, ones that were actually built as Robots, which prove to be pretty advanced AIs. The most important is Hans’ main henchman, the imposing Maximilian, who is smart and malevolent (his name is spelled with one “L” was a nod to actor Schell, and mutely played by Mime Tommy McLoughlin when not merely radio-controlled). Also not mindless is another cute Robot, B.O.B, or BiO-sanitation Battalion (bizarrely voiced by Actor Pickens), whose presence makes no sense. Why was B.O.B allowed to survive so long? B.O.B. has no loyalty to Hans who happily killed so many humans. Also, how is it that B.O.B. is unaware of the mass-murder?

 

(The actors voicing the two cute Robots were both recognizable stars who got substantial screen time, yet McDowell and Pickens’ roles went uncredited. How did that happen?)

 

The script is full of embarrassments, most famously its abuses of Science and basic narrative logic. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated “It is the most scientifically inaccurate movie of all time. They got none of the physics right." This is largely correct, though when he called it “the most” what he’s really was admitting he’s seen fewer bad SF films than I have. The Space Ship Palomino’s stated mission of searching for “habitual life” (that’s less a Scientific error than English illiteracy). There’s the pomposity of the inaccurate descriptions of what a Black Hole actually is (like explicitly stating that someday Black Holes will "devour the universe itself." And that it is "where space and time end." Finally, Alex asks, “How can one not be overwhelmed by the deadliest force in the universe?”).

 

Jim Knipfel wrote, “Despite all the news coverage black holes had been receiving in the late ‘70s, nobody even bothers to explain what they are, how they’re formed or what they do, it’s just that big bathtub drain floating there outside the ship’s window making everyone a little antsy.”

 

The Super-Science excuse for Cygnus’s ability to maintain a stable orbit around a Black Hole is silly because plenty of stuff maintain that orbit indefinitely because of, well, High-School-level physics. The location of the Black Hole somehow being a surprise is more than merely dubious. As is Kate using her ESP to communicate with Robots. Then there’s Robot B.O.B. quivering with fear when faced by bigger-and-meaner Maximilian. Also, one of the best FX sequences involves a meteor ripping through the Cygnus’s hull, then abruptly changing trajectory and speed, and chasing the cast down an irrationally-huge maintenance duct, with no apparent consequences on the air pressure within that duct.

 

I could go on.

 

Beyond the errors and illogics there’s the fact that most the dialogue ranges from pretentious, to wooden, to annoying coy. Bad dialogue effects performances (obviously), and this is best demonstrated in Mimieux’s character Kate. She should’ve been the emotional center of the film given her search for her missing father, but she’s pretty thoughtlessly written.

 

The Producers made a conscious decision to cast big-names not much associated with SF,F&H films, but a review of the cast list demonstrates that the couldn’t completely pull that off. Kate’s casting proved especially problematic. Nelson initially wanted a largely-unknown actress named Sigourney Weaver, but someone out-ranking him nixed that because, get this, he thought her name sounded funny (I wonder what this guy’s co-workers said after “Alien” (1979) came out).

 

The next one who was seriously considered was Jennifer O’Neill. The biggest obstacle with her was that her long hair was a signature attribute to her public image, and the film had scenes simulating zero-gravity, which made the hair a problem. She clearly wanted to be part of an A-release epic, and did eventually did agree to a severe haircut (but only after being plied with alcohol); then, driving home from that haircut, she got involved in a serious car accident, and had to drop out of the project.

 

Mimieux, a three-time Golden Globe winner, certainly had the resume Disney wanted, but she was no SF,F&H virgin, her first film was the classic SF “The Time Machine” (1963) and by this point in her career she was mostly doing made-for-TV Horror-movies. On the other hand, she was also easier to talk into a haircut than O’Neill. I should say that no one could claim she didn’t make the best of her badly-written part, perhaps instructive is that outside this production, she was also turning to Producing and Writing just to secure herself somewhat better roles, "There are few enough films going these days, and there are three or four women who are offered all the good parts.”

 

Director Nelson seemed as committed to the re-branding as much as Producer Miller, “It was my idea to remove the Disney logo for the picture and use Buena Vista Productions.” Buena Vista was an already existent Disney subsidiary, but this tactic amounted to naught, as everyone called “The Black Hole” a Disney film even with the logo removed. It was Disney’s first PG film, an inappropriate rating, but Disney actually lobbied for it not to be “G” (in contrast, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” released mere weeks before, and had some pretty warped sexual themes, but still got a “G”).

 

When one looks up a film’s budget, marketing is generally left out. Because of this, the profitability of a film is hard to access unless the numbers are gigantic. “The Black Hole” is a rare case that I know the marketing figures, so the film’s cost was $20 million plus $6 million in marketing. Meanwhile, it grossed $35.8 million domestically, giving us a net profit of slightly under $10 million; not a big winner (rule of thumb, a hit film it generally has to gross two-and-one-half-times the initial production costs, so in this case it had to be at least $70 million), but not too shabby either. Never-the-less, that money, and the open-ending climax, failed to generate a franchise, maybe because it was so trounced by “Star Trek …” ($44 million production costs cost plus unknown marketing, then grossing $139 million domestically). Another possible reason there was no follow-up was because Disney took the re-branding one step further, creating another subsidiary devoted everything that wasn’t Animated, Children’s, or Family fair; Touchstone (launched in 1984) was wildly successful, but not interested it stuff like this.

 

Roger Ebert described it well, “The basic problem with ‘The Black Hole’ is that it doesn't really confront the challenge of being a fiction about a black hole ... The hole's a gimmick that the movie can cut away to, in between onboard plotting and scheming, and at the movie's end there is a sensational visual payoff. But somehow it comes too late: The events leading up to it have been so trivial and cliche-ridden that the movie doesn't earn its climax. And so whaddaya know? Black holes retain their reputations: Nothing can escape from them, not even this movie.”

 

 

Part two: What’s good.

 

None-the-less, there’s a strong draw to rightly-maligned work. Ebert again, “[I]t cost half as much as "Star Trek" and looks better — not as lavish, perhaps, but more original. The special effects are fancy, and the design even more so.”

 

So, the real triumph is in the Art Direction, by three men, John B. Mansbridge, Robert McCall, and Al Roelofs (the fact that there are three of them reflects the torturous evolution of this Mutant Monster), and Oscar-winning Production Designer and FX Supervisor by Peter Ellenshaw, the Master behind “Twenty-Thousand Leagues…” who was recalled from retirement for this project. He was assisted by fellow Oscar winners Eustace Lycett, Art Cruickshank and Danny Lee, all of whom were also Disney-vets. Also important was Ellenshaw’s son, Harrison, who (among other things) vitally and quickly reproduced several matte-paintings that were stolen during production (someone also stole most of the Laser Pistols). What these men contributed were not only landmark at the time, but exquisitely beautiful even today. The Starship Cygnus, looking like a haunted Cathedral floating in the seething blue and black void of Interstellar Space, remains among my favorite Space Ships. 

 

The introduction to the Cygnus, alone, is almost worth the cost of admission. As the Palomino approaches the Black Hole, the Cygnus slowly comes into view, first only a silhouette because the light of stars is too dim to permit details. Even as the details emerge, mimicking one’s eyes adjusting to the dark, it is still cloaked in gloom, so the Palomino turns on it search lights, revealing incredibly complex architectures, far more elaborate than envisioned in the paintings of McCall, who had also worked on both “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and “The Black Hole’s” main theatrical competitor, “Star Trek …” Ellenshaw made the bold decision to create the Ship from brass, not the more typical vacuum-formed plastic, allowing it to somewhat mimic the architectural skeleton of the Eiffel Tower, "… it held together better that way. Brass is much easier to handle than plastic. It's malleable to a certain degree and holds its configuration."

 

As the large-ish Palomino (large enough to sustain five people comfortably during a more-than-two-year mission) glides along the massiveness of the Cygnus, the scale of the seemingly-dead Ship is overwhelming; it seems almost the size of Manhattan Island, and just as complicated. Then, abruptly, the lights of the Cygnus come on, and huge sections now appear as it they were Green-Houses aglow in the endless night.

 

“The Black Hole” was nominated for two Oscars, the obvious one, FX, but also Cinematography, by Frank V. Phillips. One of the distinctive aspects of this film was that FX and Cinematography were so smoothly integrated it is unclear where one stopped and the other began. Matte-paintings in the background, and models or huge sets in the foreground, seem to share the same illumination, an elegant aesthetic achievement that surpassed “Star Wars” before it. Regarding the Space sequences, this was especially complex to achieve, because the models were mostly stationary, given the illusion of motion by the camera, and shot against a chroma-code screen, with the matte-paintings added-in later. This required Phillips and Ellenshaw’s son, Harrison, to work hand-in-hand, all their effects augmented by an array of highly sophisticated computers. At least two of the computer systems were Disney’s own inventions, and one has special baring here.

 

Initially, Disney had wanted to use the Dykstraflex camera system, invented by John Dykstra for “Star Wars,” and for which he earned and Oscar, but it was unavailable. This forced Disney to build their own, ACES (Automated Camera Effects System) designed by Don Iwerks, Bob Otto, David English, David Snyder and Steven Crane. It could calculate and guide the camera through 10 distinct points in space and controlled 12 axes of movement including truck, pan, roll, tilt, focus and movement of the model stand, all vibration-free. As Bob Gibeaut, Disney's VP for Studio Operations described it as a camera that “can be moved through a complex continuous or stop‐motion shot with exact repeatability,” allowing for “original‐negative, multiple‐exposure photography, with some shots lasting 12 to 14 hours, over several days.”

 

This is called “Bookkeeping,” as it kept keep track of the thousands of camera movements; it was a job that was becoming too laborious for humans scribbling in notebooks with pencils. The computers radically cut down on time, labor, and operator fatigue. Back in the 1960s, Director Stanley Kubrick knew he needed such a system for the Space sequences in “2001 …” but it didn’t exist, and when he reached out to IBM, they responded that such technology could not be built, at least not yet. His lack of such a system was one of the reasons “2001 …” was in production for three years while “The Black Hole,” which took barely more than one. Disney spent $1 million dollars on their version, and it proved superior to the one it was trying to imitate; they were confident it would garner its own Oscar, but it didn’t.

 

Peter Ellenshaw was among the greatest FX men of his day, but oddly, did less SF than most others in his film (one of his major triumphs was Romantic Drama “Black Narcissus” (1947) which required the creation of a convincing environment of mountainous India even though the production never left the Hollywood sound-stage), and most of his SF films, like “Twenty-Thousand Leagues…” were set in the past. This seemed to guide him towards an almost anti-SF aesthetic which proved to be the best aspect of this film’s design.

 

This was not the kind of sterile, white-on-white future you saw in “2001…” “The Andromeda Strain” and “THX-1138" (the latter two both 1971). Ellenshaw also avoided wall-to-wall computer displays providing volumes of information that the cast doesn’t even glance at. The computer panels, often presented as faked holograms, provide only minimal information, mostly consisting of orderly patterns of basic colors and big images of astronomical objects, so the style of the mattes in the background was reflected the style of the sets in the fore-ground. One can see the influence of Painters as radically different as Marc Chagall and Peit Mondrian, and though one would think these would look meaningless and out-of-context, they in-fact, communicated more, and far more beautifully, than the tiny blinking lights in most other Space films.

 

The extensive use of Computers in FX was exploding during the late 1970s and early 1980s, “Star Wars” being the key landmark, and “The Black Hole” running a close second. It wasn’t just the camera-operating Bookkeeping systems, it was also the creeping, hesitant, move into Computer Graphic Imagining (CGI). Both films feature computer-created images of 3-D objects in motion by combining contour lines and warped grids. In “Star Wars” it was the representation of the Death Star seen in the War Room of the Rebel Base (this was not the first time CGI was in a feature film, but the first really important example). In “The Black Hole” it was the representation of how the Black Hole warps Space-Time (making it the second or third feature to apply such graphics). Despite this being extremely primitive, all these decades later, it’s still pretty effectively visually, and that primitive process, “Digital Computer Animation” still pops up from time-to-time. You can now do it on your laptop, but back then it was enormously expensive (the “Star Wars” animations were one-and-one-half-minutes long, but three-months labor). On the other hand, the rest of “The Black Holes” apparent CGI were actually hand-drawn/painted.

 

This was CGI at its most basic. What we now call CGI, which combines 3-D grid-modeling with realistic surface textures “wrapped” around it, wasn’t available at the time. The first feature to use of that kind of sophisticated CGI was only two-years away in, “Looker” (1981), which didn’t receive its deserved credit because the rest of the movie kinda sucked. Then came “Tron” (1982, another Disney) which pushed the envelope eve farther and as a result got all the credit.

 

The lack of sophisticated CGI had baring on the visualization of the Black Hole itself, which couldn’t be merely a matte-painting, because the makers of this motion-picture wanted, well, motion.

 

Art Cruickshank explained how it was done, "In order to achieve that swirling central section of the black hole, it was necessary to build a clear plexiglass tank that was 6 feet in diameter and 6-feet deep. An impeller was installed at the bottom of it so that when we filled it with water we could create a whirlpool-like effect. Now when we had our vortex going, Peter Ellenshaw would climb up on a ladder and drop various colored lacquers into the water which stayed in a state of suspension and didn't combine with the water itself. He kept that up and we shot a lot of footage of those swirls until he finally got what he wanted.”

 

Ellenshaw added, "We lit it from below because I didn't want any reflection on the surface that would reveal it as real water. Art and I would be posed over the tank on ladders and pour lacquers in by the bucketful. We later matted-in stars and gradations of color. Harrison took our footage and made a matte of it. He added stars to it and then put it against a background of stars. We then used that as our plate to put behind the Cygnus."

 

Miller said, "We've tried to envision the unimaginable in this movie and we're hoping that audiences will go see it for that reason alone. We're trying to go beyond what people seem to feel Disney represents today. If we succeed with ‘The Black Hole,’ it will mean a whole new beginning for us. And if we don't succeed…What a great attempt this movie is!”

 

Another challenge was the illusion of weightlessness and levitation. The weightlessness scenes were short, but three of the Robots levitated (V.I.N.CENT, B.O.B. and Maximilian), and at least one of them was on-screen in almost every shot. This created the need for a lot of wire work. Many a film faltered on illusions such as this was before the Digital Revolution, though the wires were same color as the set or matte, it was still difficult to erase them post-production, which meant every motion had to be meticulously choregraphed.

 

These effects were complex, but it was also something Disney studio had more experience in than virtually any other studio from both their cinema and live shows. Director Nelson, “When we had wires they were hard to disguise. We would film the actors upside down so that the wires would go down to the floor rather than up to the ceiling, and that way you could disguise them a little better.”

 

Actor Forester, “Getting the wires to be invisible was a technical problem, and the wires were very often painted the color of the background in order to make them seem invisible.” The Actors required to attend two weeks of training at a Circus Camp. “All I can remember about those harnesses were that they were uncomfortable. You feel like you're floating, and they tell you how to steady yourself, like people who sky dive. Move your arms in a certain way, and the body in a certain way.”

 

Also, careful blocking often made wires unnecessary, Forester again, “There were so many little techniques for making it look like the little robots were weightless. V.I.N.CENT was sometimes on a little rolling teeter totter that somebody off-camera was tipping up and down so that it looked like he was floating.”

 

Another wonderful aspect of the film was John Barry’s epic score. It and “Star Trek …” were the last two theatrical releases to use a true overture for the next twenty-one years. Overtures in films are an appealing, but somewhat pretentious, gesture of one announcing one’s own legitimacy, sorta like beating your chest and shouting, “It’s not merely a movie, IT’S CINEMA!” They were most popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but beginning to be seem old-hat by 1979. There was another reason they disappeared, that was also the year the Multiplex-wars began with the opening of the 18-screen (soon expanded to 21 screens) Cineplex at the Toronto Eaton Centre in Canada. Soon these giant movie theaters, dependent on extreme high-volume traffic to survive, started playing havoc on the running-times of features they showed. It is no surprise that overtures didn’t start returning to features until the Multiplexes began to die-out.

 

 

The overture, quite deliberately, echoed the emotions of the “Star Wars” theme, all heroic and triumphant, but then it radically shifts for the title sequence becoming, as Critic Tim Brayton wrote, “threatening, insinuating piece of jagged spacey music that suggests both mystery and exciting danger.” The score is one of Barry’s best, but got snubbed of even an Oscar nomination.

 

The use of the overture was especially interesting because of how short this film is, only 93 minutes, two-and-one-half of them being that overture. I believe this might be a reflection of everyone involved knowing how problematic this script was, and deciding to focus on the techniques of story-telling rather than the story itself. I’ve repeatedly compared aspects of “The Black Hole” to “Star Trek …” which was not only a more successful, but in most ways, better film; “Star Trek …” had a much better story and Characterization BUT it was also painfully bloated at 132 minutes. Here, Miller, Nelson, et all, seemed conscious their story was exactly what they lacked, and therefore told it with the most extreme economy.

 

I should also address the one interestingly-written character was also the film’s best performance. As typical in film’s gone astray, the best character isn’t a Hero, but the Villain.

 

As difficult as some of the casting was, Director Nelson had only one person in mind for Character Hans, and that was Actor Schell. Nelson tells an amusing story about their first meeting, during it Schell appeared to be pulling a bait-and-switch -- though he traveled far for the meeting and as being offered the role, he recommended someone else for it, Actor Jason Robards. Schell told Nelson, “Stanley Kubrick had just told him of this miniseries he’d seen with Robards … By the way, have you seen it? It’s called ‘Washington: Behind Closed Doors.’”

 

That TV miniseries (1977) was actually directed by Nelson and still remains his most honored work.

 

Nelson, “I thought he was jerking me off. I said, ‘Yes, I not only saw it, I directed it.’ And his face was the most honest shock I've seen on a person. You couldn’t direct him any better. And he grabbed me, threw his arms around me and gave me a great big fucking kiss on the mouth and said, ‘I will do your movie.’ And that was it.”

 

Part three: Why good stands triumphant!

 

In retrospect, this is a film that shouldn’t have been made, one shouldn’t invest $20 million dollars if one is unsatisfied with the script, yet somehow this train-wreck of a film has proven to have lasting resonance.

 

The why of this improbability is probably best demonstrated if we start with the movie’s single, really violent, scene. It demonstrates both the script’s Death-by-Rewrite and it’s bizzarro Redemption because the people scrambling to make this lead balloon fly were really talented.

 

The Character Alex had been somewhat seduced by Hans’ mad vision, but when it got too crazy and he voiced objections. Silent Maximilian then stepped in without a command and disemboweled Alex (this is bloodless because Alex flutily tried to shield himself with a Bible, it didn’t save him, but it did disguise the gore underneath). Then Hans, clearly terrified, begs Kate to protect him from Maximilian. That line appears to have been improvised on-set by Shell, and opened a huge can of worms because it wasn’t fore-shadowed, and not addressed again until a wildly surreal sequence in the climax.

 

The climax shows our Heroes (or at least the not-dead ones) escaping the Cygnus is a small Probe Ship (the Palomino is already toast). As the Cygnus is ripped to shreds by the Black Hole’s gravitational forces, the Probe is able to find a safe path through. As Space-Time tortuously warps around our Heroes, Kate has a hallucination of a Dante-esque Hell, with fire, craggy mountains, crumbling architectures, the hooded figures of lost souls, and Maximilian. Behind Maximilian’s inexpressive face plate, we see Hans’ terrified eyes -- he’s trapped inside of his Servant-now-Master for all eternity. Or Heroes escape through a Cathedral-like tunnel of something-that-looks-like-glass, guided by an Angel. All this this was clearly inspired by the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940).

 

So, what does that mean? Probably not much, but maybe everything. Nelson admitted that they didn’t have an ending when they started shooting, and still didn’t have one even when Principal Photography was grinding to a close. “Anyone who read the last page saw, in essence, ‘They go through the black hole …’ That was it. They enter the black hole, end of movie … We never had an ending for it. I didn't like [it] … Nobody liked [it] … We just kept shooting hoping that I would come up with an ending, or that Peter Ellenshaw would come up with an ending, or Harrison, his son.”

 

The ending wasn’t fully conceived until Post-Production. (Actor Forester stated he had no idea what the ending would be until he attending the film’s premier.) There was a clear wish to have it evoke the visual-glut of the Stargate sequence in “2001 …” but reflecting more conventional Religious themes, and thereby reflecting some other stuff in the Script. The first executed version was more a collage than the one described above, starting with a close-up of Kate’s eye, then pulling back to see it had become the eye of Adam from Michelangelo’s painting of the ceiling of Sistine Chapel, where God is reaching out to him. The Production even got permission from the Vatican to location-shoot in the Chapel, but wisely someone recognized how misguided this idea was and it landed on the cutting-room floor.

 

I recently read an article by John Kenneth Muir that makes the case that the string of accidents that created the version we see (Muir seems unaware they were accidents) unified the entire film. Basically, he argues very convincingly that we should not look at this as an SF film at all, but a symbol-laden visualization of the ideas of the 3^rd c. Persian Philosopher Mani, who was the founder of the Manichaean religion. Manichaeanism taught an extreme dualistic view of Good and Evil, their key belief was that God is powerful, but not omnipotent, and at constant war with the equally powerful Devil. The Physical World and Human existence are by-products of that on-going war.  Spirituality is good, Materialism is bad. The Soul is closer to God, but the Physical Body, and the ravenous Hungers associated with it, more reflect the Devil.

Hans has become a Servant of his Hungers, and therefore the Servant of his Robot Slaves (Robots being the ultimate symbol of Materialism). That’s why he needed to turn Humans into Robots and why the Demonic-looking Maximilian felt the need to kill the more Spiritual Alex, who at a vital moment showed the strength to resist Temptation. Hans’ surrender to the Devil is made most explicit when, during the hallucination, we see him embrace Maximilian and become trapped inside the Robot’s shell. The color-symbolism throughout the film buttress this, notably the uses of white, grey, or beige (the Spirit) vs red or black (the Devil) in the uniforms and Robot shells. The damned souls in Hell are dressed like the Robot/Zombies from the Cygnus. The Cathedral-like Cygnus is metallic, dark, and sinister, while the Cathedral-like passage to the next Universe is aglow with light.

 

Ironically, Manichaeanism is considered a Heresy by conventional Christianity and now almost extinct, so I doubt all-American and then-largely Conservative Disney (Disney wouldn’t publicly embrace Gay Pride until 1991) would’ve celebrated so a radical path if it had they any idea what they were doing.

 

Though the Manichaean messaging was clearly unintended, it made more sense than the overtly Christian one that was cut.

 

As it was unintended, there are some contradictions: Since everyone is a Space Traveler, the Materialism of Technology is inevitably the most important thing in their lives. When the Heroes fly to Heaven, it is not on the wings of an Angel, but by following the Angel in a Materialistic Space Ship. Also, how did one of the Robots, again Materialism, achieve transcendence along with the Humans? Hell, the two liveliest characters weren’t Human, but the cute Robots, V.I.N.CENT and B.O.B. (unlike the rest of the Robots in the film, they were not one color, but white with red stripes). Hmm … does Manichaeanism philosophy explain V.I.N.CENT’s improbable physic like to Kate?

 

I lingered so long on this to make a point. Even if you only half-accept Muir’s recognition of the unintended content, it is still the ultimate statement of what went right in this film. This really isn’t a SF, it’s pure visual poetry (well, except the middle section, the middle sucks no matter how you look at it). The poetry was late-arriving, a product of hard-work and a bit of luck overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.

 

So, success only requires a lot of hard-work and a little bit of luck. How perfectly American. How very Disney.

 

Trailer:

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