Film Friday: The Black Hole (1979) v. Event Horizon (1997)

Disney’s The Black Hole and Paul Anderson’s Event Horizon don’t seem to have much in common. Black Hole is classic science fiction with robots and mad scientists and questions about the meaning of life. Event Horizon is a slasher film set in space. So why compare them? Because they’re actually the same movie.

** spoiler alert **

Black Hole has a fascinating history. It was the first Disney film not classified as suitable for all ages and it made $36 million at the box office and another $25 million in rentals on a $20 million budget. This success led Disney to experiment with more adult-oriented films, which led to the creation of Touchstone Pictures.

Black Hole is the story of the crew of the USS Palomino, whose mission is to search the universe for signs of life. In the process, they discover a derelict ship hovering on the edge of a black hole. This is the USS Cygnus, captained by Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell). After boarding the ship, they discover that Reinhardt is still alive. He’s surrounded by robots -- drones, security troops and a sinister robot called Maximilian. Reinhardt claims the original human crew abandoned ship when the Cygnus was damaged. He stayed aboard hoping to save the ship and continue his research. In the twenty years since the ship went missing, he has perfected an anti-gravity drive and he now plans to use that to take the Cygnus into the black hole itself. Soon, Reinhardt’s story starts to unravel and the Palomino crew discover that the Cygnus crew never left, they have been turned into these drones. Reinhardt tries to kill them and a running battle ensues. During this battle, the Cygnus enters the black hole, which we learn is a gateway to both Heaven and Hell.

Despite surface differences, Event Horizon is rather similar. In Event Horizon, the crew of the Lewis and Clark are dispatched to investigate and rescue a derelict ship. That ship is the Event Horizon, which vanished seven years prior. It vanished because it was using a gravity drive which harnesses the power of a man-made black hole. When the original crew operated the gravity drive, that drive sucked them to Hell. It then returned the ship after the crew slaughtered each other in an orgy of blood. Like Black Hole, there is a mad scientist in the person of Sam Neill, who designed the Event Horizon and is a passenger on the Lewis and Clark. The return of the ship pushes him over the edge of sanity and he eventually tries to kill the crew of the Lewis and Clark, and that’s the whole plot. This film was a bust making only $26 million on a budget of $60 million.

So consider this: both stories involve derelict ships found by rescuers. They are derelict because of black holes, which become the cause of the plot. Both black holes lead to Hell. Both films involve killer mad scientists as the villains. Both films have someone on the rescue ship who lost a family member when the derelict disappeared. Both rescue ships get destroyed, as do the derelicts, and both crews escape in lifepods. That’s pretty similar. Yet, Event Horizon stunk whereas Black Hole is truly an under-appreciate gem. Here’s why.

Event Horizon is one of those films with lots of promise which never pays off, which is typical of Paul Anderson films because they lack substance. Look at the characters for example. Despite having a solid cast (Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill and Jason Isaacs), you never care about the characters because they’re all the same. They all have the identical motivations and personalities. You could literally swap their names and jobs halfway through the film and no one could tell. Black Hole, by comparison, has inferior actors, but vastly superior characters. Each characters has their own strengths and weaknesses which make them relevant and memorable. Captain Holland is smart and cautious. Lt. Pizer is reckless and brave. Booth (Ernest Borgnine) is cowardly. Dr. Durant (Anthony Perkins) is easily awed and becomes torn between the crew and Reinhardt. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux) has ESP, and VINCENT (Roddy McDowall) is the feisty, brave and motherly floating robot sidekick. The Black Hole crew are interesting and unique, with each guaranteed to have their good and bad moments in the story. The Event Horizon crew are just bodies to be fed into the special-effects grinder at regular intervals.

Now consider the villains. In Event Horizon the villain is ostensibly the ship, only the real villain is Sam Neill. And while I normally like Neill, here he just plays the standard “appears out of nowhere, says something evil, slaughters crew” type villain. You can’t remember a single line or moment. By comparison, Black Hole has three layers of villains, plus a surprise villain in Borgnine. The first layer is the security robots, who are easy to evade unless they appear in great numbers. Then you have Reinhardt who is crawling with complex motivations. He’s upset the world hasn’t recognized his genius and he’s obsessed with entering the black hole. He’s also gone mad living alone and fears Maximilian. Finally, you have Maximilian, who is a silent mechanical killing machine, like an early terminator, who becomes the personification of Satan. This affords the heroes in Black Hole a much greater and more interesting challenge.

Interestingly, Black Hole also becomes the more effective horror film, even though it’s not a horror film. And no, I’m not kidding. Black Hole means to be science fiction, not horror, but it has a tension which ratchets up repeatedly and leaves you with chilling psychological questions. The film begins with the discovery of the seeming ghost ship, the Cygnus. The ambiance is eerie because it is the kind of environment you can easily imagine where people once occupied the ship and now they are gone to some unexplained fate. It’s like being in an abandoned building where you know something evil happened, and it plays on our fear of being alone, fear of being hunted, and fear of the unknown. Then the Palomino crew discover that the drones are what is left of the original crew, who now live in a desiccated, zombie-like living-death existence. The terror of being imprisoned as the walking dead within your own body for the last twenty years suddenly hits the audience. Finally, the fight for survival begins.

Event Horizon offers no such mid-level tension, it just proceeds from creepy arrival to bloodbath. The ship is dark and ugly and unrealistic, and the plot is entirely watching these people get blown up and sliced apart in an orgy of blood. It’s all very gross and very generic. Yawn. The difference is this: Black Hole touches upon things that scare us and leaves you with several disturbing thoughts to consider when the film is over, Event Horizon leaves you with some ugly pictures you soon forget. Supplementing this, Black Hole has a masterful John Barry soundtrack which has a dizzying effect and supplements the emotional triggers of the film. Event Horizon has a forgettable heavy-metal soundtrack.

The endings are substantively different as well. Black Hole poses the interesting question of what lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole, and it answers that Heaven and Hell are there. It then suggests a view of both, with Hell involving fire, perpetual slavery, and loneliness. Event Horizon sets up the same premise that black holes are gateways to Hell, but it never really explains anything except to say that this somehow caused the crew to butcher each other. . . for some reason. That’s hardly contemplative.

Both Event Horizon and Black Hole have become cult classics, but there’s really no comparison. Black Hole is a well-designed movie which steps up the tension bit by bit, creates a solid eerie atmosphere, gives you lively and unique characters, and finishes with some memorable and thought-provoking ideas. Event Horizon is a bloodbath and nothing more. Its characters are carbon copies, its plot is minimal, it relies on cheap tricks to shock you rather than scare you, and it’s entirely forgettable.

It’s fascinating that two films with virtually identical premises can turn out so differently. I would love to see what a Ridley Scott could do with this concept.