3. Ambiguous Storyline
If there's one aspect to The Black Hole's muddled script that one can truly embrace, it's the ambiguity of what the crew of the Palamino encounters while on board the U.S.S. Cygnus. This was a vessel that had a large crew of humans when it left earth, and somehow became littered with robots or in the case of the photo above, mutes with masks. Why is that? Sure, one could surmise that the whacked out Dr. Hans Reinhardt (who I'll get to discussing at length later), turned his entire crew into a bunch of zombies. However, the part that serves to engage my brain is attempting to imagine how it all went down. What kind of an ill-fated fight did they put up? By processing how horrific it could have been adds a much needed layer of imagination to the film's fairly simplistic plot. Cast in point, there are no flashbacks, nothing is spelled out in any manner for what happened before the heroes arrive, and that is wonderful thing! One other piece to this puzzle is what happened to Kate McCrae's father? I got the vibe that perhaps he was turned into Maximilian, to be Reinhardt's servant and butcher, maybe? Nonetheless, I wish more film's in the modern era provided the audience with the ability to make up their own reasoning on how events played out in the past. (Prometheus is one rare exception in recent memory) Now let's take a look at the underrated cast of this underrated film...