The Black Hole (1979)

Disney's most expensive picture of 1979 arrives with the grim determination of a studio attempting to purchase gravity itself. The Black Hole concerns the USS Palomino, a crew of white men, one white woman, a journalist, and a chirpy robot, all of whom stumble upon the long-lost Cygnus and its master, Dr. Hans Reinhardt. What follows is a haunted-house picture in vacuum-sealed packaging: lobotomized crew members, a silent red robot named Maximilian, and a climax that detours into a burning hellscape and a crystal cathedral. The film's ambitions are metaphysical, not social. It has no interest in the world it left behind, which spares us the customary sermonizing.

The cast is uniformly white and the film never once notices. Race does not enter the frame, nor does sexuality, nor class, nor the climate. Reinhardt is a mad scientist, not a plutocrat, so there is no economic critique to be extracted from his drones. The lobotomized crew is horror imagery, not a metaphor for anything we are meant to applaud. Dr. Kate McCrae holds a doctorate and possesses extrasensory perception, which is more than most of her contemporaries were permitted, yet the screenplay promptly reduces her to cargo: she is nearly lobotomized, then rescued, then escorted to the probe ship. Her competence is set dressing. The production history offers its own small tragedy, with Sigourney Weaver passed over because a casting director disliked her name, and Jennifer O'Neill losing the part after a haircut, a glass of wine, and a car.

What remains is craft. The matte paintings, the ACES camera system, the digitally recorded John Barry score, and an overture, which is the most old-fashioned thing here. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards and won neither. It is a beautiful, humorless, strangely solemn vessel drifting toward nothing in particular, and it asks nothing of us but awe. That is not a small thing. It is merely a quiet one.