EVENT HORIZON
Starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill and Joely Richardson
Written by Philip Eisner
Directed by Paul Anderson
The year is 2047. The weary crew of the salvage and rescue vessel "Lewis and Clark" return to Earth only to learn they have to postpone shore leave for another mission: find and explore the experimental starship "Event Horizon", which disappeared seven years earlier and which has now mysteriously returned in low orbit around Neptune with no sign of survivors. Captain Joe Miller (Laurence Fishburne) doesn't like it one bit, and he doesn't like his new passenger Dr. Wier (Sam Neill), who designed the "Event Horizon" and who seems to know more than he's letting on.
The crew set course for Neptune and hop into their stasis tubes for the journey. A couple months later, they emerge in Neptune space. From Dr. Wier they learn that the "Event Horizon" is more experimental than they knew- it's designed for deep interstellar flight. Its "gravity drive" in essence creates its own black hole and then slips through it, thereby allowing it to travel to any point in the known Universe instantaneously. Seven years ago the ship vanished on its maiden voyage; now it's back. Where it has been is anyone's guess. When the "Lewis and Clark" crew dock with the Horizon and board her, they discover only corpses, and a copy of the ship's log on CD which may hold the answers to the fate of her crew.
The easy shot against this picture is that it's yet another ALIEN rip-off; on the surface this is certainly the case. You have the same band of misfits who grudgingly function as crew, you have the derelict spaceship and the claustrophobia and fear which mount as they realize that Something Else is on board. The spaceships are grungy and retro (this look owes more to the "Millennium Falcon", which came first, than to the "Nostromo", which followed), the crew members chain-smoke and could use a bath. Same old story. But EVENT HORIZON isn't a monster movie- it's a ghost story. The crew find not venom-spewing aliens in the deserted vessel, but rather physical manifestations of their own inner demons. Captain Miller sees the crewman he left behind to die in a zero-G fire on his previous assignment. Wier sees his wife, who committed suicide. Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) sees her dead son. Suffice it to say that nobody sees any trippy lights or groovy acid flashbacks. The ship knows their weak spots, and knows how to exploit them.
This plot too is nothing new; as other critics have pointed out, it's been done in outer space before in the 1972 Russian sci-fi film SOLARIS, and underwater in shameless hack Michael Crichton's SPHERE (also now a major motion picture, due in December). HORIZON's twist is to propose that the ship in question literally went to Hell and back- and has returned sentient, and hungry. It needs new souls upon which to feed.
Despite a sketchy set-up and a cast of characters to which the term "two-dimensional" is a compliment, I rooted for this picture, and pretty much stuck with it to the end. This was due in no small part to the stunning visual effects, which did a lot to overcome my doubts. I try not to recommend a film strictly on the basis of its value as eye-candy, but this summer I've done it twice: first for THE FIFTH ELEMENT, the lame-brained plot of which is overcome by its HEAVY METAL visual appeal; and now for HORIZON. The set design and special effects are staggering in their beauty. The clouds of Neptune are awe-inspiring, the spaceships elegant and majestic, both inside and out. The core of the "Horizon", in which is housed the giant concentric rings of the gravity drive, looks like a medieval torture chamber. If it is possible for a spaceship to look evil, then production designer Joseph Bennett has succeeded admirably.
But does the film deliver in the scare department? Well, yes and no. The pernicious influence of Oliver Stone rears its ugly head again in Director Paul Anderson's use of rapid-fire subliminal editing techniques to deliver most of the shocks. No expense is spared in the gore department; when X.O. Starck (Joely Richardson) finally decodes the ship's log, the images of what transpired with the former crew will raise the hackles on the most jaded of Clive Barker fans. But there is precious little edge-of-your seat suspense. Movies like ALIEN and HALLOWEEN scare so efficiently because they delay the payoff and leave the carnage mostly to the imagination. HORIZON trades suspense for shock value. While the gore is creative and some of the scenes harrowing to watch, the result is a film of lesser quality.
Even so, I kept watching. The premise of the film grabbed me, and the visuals kept me hooked even as the execution proved disappointing. Sadly, the film looks pared to the bone, as if some crazed editor crept into the studio at night and hacked off about a third of the footage. Despite sturdy work from the cast, particularly Fishburne and Richard T. Jones as Cooper, the gung-ho security officer, none of them are given enough screen time to flesh out the characters. The key transformation of one character from good guy to villain is handled so abruptly that we're left wondering exactly when it happened, or why. The climax occurs twenty minutes too soon. When the lights came up I was left wanting more- which is normally a good thing, but in this case it's not that I wanted the film to go on, I just wanted to go back and flesh out the film I'd already seen. Too bad. A little more suspense, a little more hellfire and damnation, and EVENT HORIZON might have become a horror classic. Still, if great set design and dazzling special effects are your bag, then it's close enough for jazz.
Grade: B-
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