Subject: Review: Event Horizon (1997)

From: Kevin Patterson <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Jul 1998 16:06:31 GMT

Film review by Kevin Patterson

EVENT HORIZON
Rating: ** (out of four)
R, 1997
Director: Paul Anderson
Screenplay: Philip Eisner
Starring Cast: Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne.

EVENT HORIZON is the latest entry into the sci-fi/horror sub-genre of
Movies About Weird Stuff Happening In Deep Space. With its ominous-looking
visual design and its setting on a spaceship trapped inside the atmosphere
of the planet Neptune, it aspires to be a claustrophobic piece of isolation
and fear in the tradition of ALIEN. But while ALIEN can lay claim to a
reasonably well-developed story and interesting characters to engage the
audience's attention, EVENT HORIZON cannot: its screenplay is vague and
undeveloped, and it is populated by one-dimensional figures who are there
mainly to run around, scream in fright, and bleed profusely.

As the film begins, we learn that it is the year 2047, and a deep space
research ship known as the Event Horizon, having disappeared without a
trace seven years ago, has now reappeared near Neptune and has sent out a
garbled message to Earth. The Event Horizon has the capability to move
faster than light through a sort of dimensional jump initiated by a
"gravity drive" designed by Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), who is now assigned to a
military team led by Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne). Their mission is
to recover the ship and determine the fate of its crew. When they
eventually reach the ship, they discover that everyone on board is dead,
either killed or driven to suicide by some sort of otherwordly force that
has occupied the ship during the attempted dimensional jump: "save
yourselves from Hell," an Event Horizon crew member has recorded over the
ship's log. The force is still present, and it soon begins wreaking havoc
on Miller's crew.

This mix of science fiction and supernatural horror is on tenuous ground
from the beginning. Science fiction normally lends itself to strange and
fantastic events that are nevertheless explainable, at least according to
some sort of movie pseudoscience. But Philip Eisner's screenplay seems to
posit that the evil forces of EVENT HORIZON are demonic, or at least
non-corporeal, which raises the question of why these demons would suddenly
decide to pick on the crew of an experimental spaceship, as opposed to your
average Joe Earthling. A ship moving faster than light could easily find
itself on the wrong side of the universe, but I'm not sure why it would
wind up in Hell. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't seem to know the answer,
or at least it never lets the audience in on the secret.

In any case, this concept is handled somewhat inconsistently by the
filmmakers. If you're going to make a horror movie with a paper-thin story,
you might as well at least concentrate on the more frightening aspect of
it, which in this case would be the supernatural. But this demon, or
demonic alien, or living hell-ship, or whatever it is, spends an awful lot
of time using a possessed crew member to blow stuff up and shoot at the
others when it has already proven that it can drive someone to suicide with
hallucinations. Of course, it never actually does anything to help its
cause, like deactivating life support or disabling the auto-destruct system
(perhaps it was too busy filling a corridor with blood at the time). There
is also one action sequence, in which a crew member is thrown thousands of
miles into outer space, but returns to the exact point where he left using
propulsion from his spacesuit's air tanks, that is so implausible that I
literally shouted, "Oh, come ON!" at the screen. It's as if the filmmakers
thought it was sufficient simply to create on-screen mayhem even if most of
it makes very little sense.

The screenplay supplies some of the characters with guilt complexes or
conflicts of one sort or another, but they are of relatively minor
significance and are nothing we haven't seen before (Weir mourns his dead
wife, Miller remembers another officer whom he was forced to let die,
another crew member misses her child, etc.). Miller's conflict with Weir,
whom he resents because his team was called off leave for this mission,
seems pretty unprofessional and is something I might have expected from one
of the junior team members instead of the captain. Cooper, a foul-mouthed,
cocky young officer, supplies some comic relief, but his personality
contrasts so much with the others that he sometimes seems like he
accidentally wandered in from a Quentin Tarantino movie. And none of this
much matters in the first place, because the characters rarely get a chance
to think about what's happening or engage in much dialogue before there's
another explosion or another hallucination or another blood flood.

That's not to say that EVENT HORIZON isn't at least partly effective: the
apparitions and hallucinations are genuinely scary. And while director Paul
Anderson is stuck with a pretty bad script, he at least manages to conjure
up some claustrophobia and dread with the movie's remote setting, and this
setup invests a certain chill into a series of gruesome confrontations that
otherwise might have been merely disgusting. (And lest anyone think I was
being facetious in my earlier comments about blood, these scenes are indeed
gruesome: I don't think I've seen this much blood in a movie since
FANTASTIC VOYAGE.) Something pretty frightening is happening in this movie,
though it's anyone's guess as to exactly what.

EVENT HORIZON gets a passing grade as a horror flick, but that's about all
it gets: the plot is a mess, and even the scares rely too heavily on shock
and gore. The isolated outer space setting and the ambitious, extravagantly
creepy design of the ship's interior are really all that's noteworthy about
this film. The rest of it could have been made by any horror hack with a
camera, a few actors, and large quantities of fake blood.

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