![]() The faceless android crew also adds to the movie’s ominous atmosphere as the Palomino crew catch glimpses of their strangely human behavior. The Cygnus is by turns ominous, lavish, overwhelming, and haunting - be it the Eiffel Tower-looking exterior, the towering walls of computer screens and displays on the ship’s bridge, Reinhardt’s luxurious quarters, or the empty, brutalist-looking quarters of the absent human crew. The movie’s production design crew clearly earned their paychecks on this one. The Cygnus itself helps set this mood, thanks to its foreboding external design and vast, empty interiors. The Black Hole really works best in its first couple of acts, as the Palomino discover and explore the Cygnus while slowly growing suspicious of Reinhardt’s story. However, Reinhardt - who, by this point, is clearly less than sane - might have other plans for our stalwart heroes. And when he announces his plans to travel through the black hole, they realize they need to get off the Cygnus as soon as possible. Reinhardt claims that the Cygnus’ human crew abandoned ship decades earlier, but the longer the Palomino crew stays on the Cygnus, the more they suspect that Reinhardt’s not telling the whole truth. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell), a brilliant, if somewhat unorthodox, scientist. Thought it seems abandoned at first, the Cygnus is crewed by faceless, black-robed androids and their commander, Dr. After barely surviving their own encounter with the black hole’s gravity, the Palomino crew dock with the Cygnus for repairs. Their journey is interrupted by the discovery of a massive black hole, and even more fascinating, a giant spaceship - the USS Cygnus, which had previously been assumed lost - floating nearby in defiance of the black hole’s gravitational pull. Set at some point in the future, The Black Hole begins with the crew of the USS Palomino returning to Earth after a deep space exploration mission. But even so, the following contains potential spoilers for The Black Hole. Seeing as how this movie is over forty years old, I’m not too concerned if anything gets spoiled. Part space gothic horror (complete with a mad scientist), part clownish robot antics, part space exploration epic, The Black Hole - which was finally released in 1979 - is a fascinating mess of a movie that’s well worth watching in spite of its flaws. Originally envisioned as a disaster film à la The Poseidon Adventure set in space, The Black Hole passed from production crew to production crew, which explains its schizophrenic nature. ![]() Considering the number of people who worked on its script and storyline (seven, by my count) and the number of years it spent in development hell, it’s kind of amazing that Disney’s The Black Hole ever got made in the first place.
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