Subject: Review: Event Horizon (1997)

From: "Shane Burridge" <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 Oct 1997 17:47:38 GMT

EVENT HORIZON  (1997)  95m.   

   It's not that EVENT HORIZON isn't well made.  It's just that I've
   been there before.  In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of another
   film more entirely fabricated of quotes from other movies.  Barely
   five minutes into the story I found myself sidetracked with
   references from obvious candidates like ALIEN, LIFEFORCE, and 2010,
   but the quotespotting soon brought forth non-SF films such as DON'T
   LOOK NOW and THE SHINING, and culminated with SOLARIS and, God help
   me, Disney's THE BLACK HOLE.

   Why is it - pardon the pun - that black hole movies always suck? 
   It's a fascinating subject that still hasn't been treated right by
   Hollywood.  In this case, the Event Horizon is not the rim of a
   black hole, but the name of a spaceship that reappears in Neptune's
   orbit after a seven year absence.  But maybe it's really a
   non-Event Horizon.  It's a Marie Celeste in Space scenario, the
   kind of story that early STAR TREK episodes bought the patent on
   years ago.  To be fair, the opening scenes are writ large upon the
   screen, at least proving once again that SF cinema was the reason
   that Panavision was invented.  The actors - Laurence Fishburne and
   Sam Neill head the cast - are all fine, the sets are great, the
   budget is big, there is some legitimate haunted-house atmosphere, a
   couple of gripping sequences, and at least one moment that made me
   laugh (when Fishburne decisively announces they're vacating the
   ship).  But there are still holes in the plot, and I don't mean the
   black kind either, that keep the film from being solidly grounded:
   the abandonment of all scientific rationale (even Neill's pragmatic
   Doctor gives up) shows that the film-makers were less interested in
   explanation than effect.  And, come to think of it, isn't there a
   crew member unaccounted for at the end?

   It may not be the movie’s fault.  I guess I was expecting something
   more purely science-fictional, and instead got that SF-horror
   hybrid that seems to have consumed the genre of late.  If I had
   seen EVENT HORIZON fifteen years ago I would have no doubt loved
   it.  But you can only jump out of your seats from the same shock
   effects so many times, and after that there's not a lot left for a
   story to go on.  Which is a shame, because I wanted to enjoy this
   film more than I did.  Contrary to its title, EVENT HORIZON didn't
   take me into unchartered territory.  The most unexpected thing
   about the ending was hearing a song by the Prodigy played over the
   final credits.