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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