It is only a matter of time, but your favorite movie will be remade. Whether it’s a re-imaging of an endearing classic or a genre flick from the 60’s…anything, everything is fair game. It took me awhile to accept this and come to terms with it. Now, I will/would ALWAYS prefer an original IP or have these studios mine for ideas/stories/plots from BOOKS (there are a lot of those out there). However, if they must it is my opinion that they must delver something new. It must find something fresh to say about the material.

This is why the 1979 Walt Disney science fiction film ‘The Black Hole’ is a perfect candidate for a remake.

Some might argue that the screenwriter for a modern Science Fiction movie that ‘everyone’ considers so crappy (The Spaiths/Prometheus debacle of 2012) that it constitutes a sort of misguided version of a movie is being asked to write a script for a reboot of a totally meh Disney Sci-fi movie that was laughably bad? They might call it a marriage made in hell! And that the resulting movie may well strain everyone’s suspension of disbelief so badly that it will cause a crash that will destroy the science fiction, niche and fantasy genres all together. Sort of like Wall Street circa 1929 only with moviegoers’ expectations instead of dolla dolla bills y’all.

While the original Black Hole is not a great film, it does have flashes of awesome.

The Spaceship And The Space.

The Cygnus is one of the most interesting and beautiful spaceships ever put on film. The multi-hued space was unlike anything that had been filmed before, and WAY ahead of its time. Look at how BRIGHT space is in the movie, it’s such a unique take and departure from the “infinite blackness” that we’re used to seeing. Those veils of color in the starfield background were absolutely necessary to be able to play with the Cygnus’ dark silhouette. There’s something to say about how shades of blue can instill a sense of majestic depth in a background shot. C’mon, it’s from the team that made ‘Mary Poppins’ only in SPACE by way of Edgar Allen Poe. The original is basically a big haunted house in zero gravity. Kosinski’s (Director of Tron Legacy and Oblivion and now, T.B.H.) eye for all things design will make this an outer space you WANT to explore.

The Score

I thought the John Barry score was the one of the best things about the original. Except for the shootout scenes in the third act. It all seemed repetitious and more likely just sloppily looped and cut to fit the scenes in a rushed post-production. Stay away from Dubstep for the new version and maybe get the likes of a RJD2, Danger Mouse or hell, even stick with Daft Punk and we should be good.

The Family Friendly Space Adventure With Killer Robots

Put The Black Hole up against other films of the day and I don’t think it fails for what it was designed to be, a family friendly space adventure. They took a lot of liberties with the science, but face it, black holes were surrounded by wild speculation at the time: Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time was seven years away and even the leading scientists were practically fist fighting over the subject at the time. Voyager was just reaching Jupiter. The vast majority of us just didn’t really know much truth about deep space. With what we know about astronomy today vs. the 1970’s, along with the proliferation of shows like Through the Wormhole and The Universe, it’ll still be a challenge to sell a similar plot to a better-informed audience with any measure of suspension-of-disbelief but we are a more INFORMED audience now, are we not? The weirdest “science” in the film is practically in today’s news. Psychic links to robots? Robotimized crew? Read the news about the brain-controlled robot arm or the brain to brain links with rats? Also, the underlying theme of the story, which is sufficiently muddy as to nearly disappear: a brilliant man’s obsession warps everyone around him just as a black hole warps space time around it. The Heaven and Hell thing…I don’t know where that came from, but in the original script they end up in a different universe. Even after all of THIS, I can’t help to think, it might work better as a horror thriller rather than action adventure. Dr. Reinhardt strikes me as being somewhere between Captain Ahab (with the black hole being his white whale) and Colonel Kurtz. I’d aim for something between Pandorum and Event Horizon.

BTW…Maximilian is still might be the creepiest robot ever made. I practically needed therapy after the scene where he kills Anthony Perkins.

I’m all on board for a remake. Way more than ’20K Leagues Under the Sea’…But not as much as a ‘Cat From Outerspace’ reboot. That would be truly badass.

-Dagobot

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