If you haven't seen the original Black Hole it's...not great! But does have its moments. I always remember certain bits that stood out for me watching as a kid, and director Joe Kosinski remembers the same stuff. In an interview with MTV he gives some updates on the films progress..
Kosinski says right off the bat that this isn't a return to the world created in the 1979 film. He explains:
This one will be a re-imagining. For me, it would be taking ideas and iconic elements that struck me as timeless and cool and preserving them while weaving a new story around them that's a little more '2001: [A Space Odyssey].
In the original story, the crew of the spaceship Palamino stumbles across the "lost" ship the U.S.S. Cygnus, hovering on the edge of an immense black hole. Once aboard, they find that the ship is manned by robots (including a large killer robot named Maximilian - seen in the photo above) with it's only human being Dr. Hans Reinhardt - an eminent scientist, missing for the past twenty years. His plan: to enter the Black Hole. Whether Dr. Reinhardt is a genius or a mad-man, one thing is for sure, he will not be denied his life's dream.
Kosinski's remake will tell a new story around a much bigger budget and with 30 years of new scientific knowledge on black holes.
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.
What will be carrying over from the original movie is Maximilian, the design of the ship, and the thing that stuck with me most, SPOILER, the graphic death of one of the main characters at the hands of old Maxy.
I saw The Black Hole as a little kid. 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.
I watched the old movie fairly recently and to say it's uneven is an understatement. Like I said, there is lots of potential there for a great remake/imagining/boot..whatever! I also hope they have a nod to the crazy, trippy fire and brimstone ending of the original in which SPOILER Maximilian and Dr. Reinhardt end up fused together in Hell!