Some movies just don’t hold up. One of those, honestly, is The Black Hole, Disney’s 1979 science fiction movie*. Like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Black Hole seemed to be emboldened by Star Wars‘ success but tried to ape 2001: A Space Odyssey and ended up being pretty airless and dull. As a kid I would flip my shit over anything related to space, so I ate the movie up, but subsequent reviewings really exposed me to the tedium my parents must have experienced taking me to the film.
Disney’s going back to their weird little late 70s/early 80s dark period, first with Tron Legacy, a sequel to the classic (but also really, really slow) video game movie and now with a remake of The Black Hole. And it’s the same guy doing both, Joseph Kosinski. While giving interviews about Tron Legacy, Kosinski tells the folks at MTV that The Black Hole is in the script stage and that they’re keeping some elements of the original.
“I saw ‘Black Hole’ as a little kid,” said Kosinski. “What sticks out most is the robot Maximilian. The blades and the vicious killing of Anthony Perkins. That freaked me out and that’s definitely going to be an element that will be preserved. The design of the Cygnus ship is one of the most iconic spaceships ever put to film. From a conceptual point of view, we know so much more about black holes now, the crazy things that go on as you approach them due to the intense gravitational pull and the effects on time and space. All that could provide us with some really cool film if we embrace it in a hard science way.”
He actually namedrops 2001 when talking about his vision for the movie, and that makes me worried. I hope he means ‘like 2001 if 2001 had all kinds of bad ass battles against robots and hideous looking cyborgs.’
* My personal connection to The Black Hole: I had already seen the movie twice when my uncle decided he wanted to take me to see The Jerk, so we told my family we were seeing The Black Hole again. I would be able to answer any questions about the movie and my family wouldn’t know I had just been taken to my first rated R movie.