EVENT HORIZON Starring: Laurence Fishburne (Captain Joe Miller), Sam Neill(Dr. William Wier), Kathleen Quinlan (Peters) Directed by: Paul Anderson Written by: Phillip Eisner
Reviewed by: Doug Skiles
The event horizon is the boundary of a black hole... and, in the future, it's also the name of a spaceship that vanished when it tried to go faster than the speed of light by traversing through its own portable black hole. Naturally, this is the setup for the other EVENT HORIZON... the movie. When the ship suddenly appears at the point that it vanished at, just outside of Neptune, the crew of the ship called the "Lewis and Clark" has to go to investigate, and Dr. William Weir, the creator of the "Event Horizon," gets to come along for the ride. If you've glanced at a poster for this movie, you know that, supposedly, what follows is "Infinite Terror." Well, I don't know about the "Terror" part, but "Infinite" certainly seems to qualify...
EVENT HORIZON is a mean-spirited, gory, sick excuse for a film. It starts off as an ALIEN rip-off, and then degenerates into a pointlessly bloody slasher flick after about 40 minutes. At least for those first 40 minutes it's an *interesting* rip-off of ALIEN. That's a lot more than can be said for the rest of them movie, which seems to go on forever. It not a scary monster movie, nor is it a psychological thriller. It is simply a movie which tries again and again to make the viewers feel sick to their stomach at the site of extreme gore. You've seen this kind of movie before. The HELLRAISER series had plenty of scenes containing this sensibility. This is a kind of movie for which I have no respect, a kind of movie which I had hoped died out years ago.
It is quite possible for a movie to frighten or shock its audience without resorting to nothing more than gore, but EVENT HORIZON takes the low road, and the viewers pay the price. There are many good, respectable performances, from Fishburne and Neill most noticably. Paul Anderson's direction is impressive, as it was in MORTAL KOMBAT. There are many nice special effects, mostly dealing with numerous common objects floating around in zero-gravity. The sets are beautiful to gaze upon. And Richard T. Jones' character (Cooper) is hilarious and extremely likable (more so than most characters I've seen in recent movies) for the little screen time that he has. And none of this can save the movie from being a D-grade level of film. The idea of a ship that has some sort of life within its walls, a life that knows the fears and inner skeletons of the human passengers, is a promising one. A haunted house story in space isn't such a bad idea. But the final execution is extremely disappointing.
That's not to say that Philip Eisner (here making his feature film-writing debut) doesn't have talent. For those first 40 minutes, he manages to make a tired premise interesting, adding in aspects of unique flavor into a rip-off story, and that's something that not too many writers can do. He even has one scene that, though it also tries to sicken the audience, has a honestly tense feel to it (the scene in question deals with one of the crew being in an airlock while others try to save him from floating into space). He definitely has something of a gift, but it's not fully on display here. I certainly will look forward to seeing more from him, and I hope that his future work fully explores his talent and the story possibilities of the premise. But because of what this movie degenerates into, I have little or no respect, and got little or no enjoyment, out of it. If this is what we have to look forward to in the future of film, then I agree with Laurence Fishburne's sentiment - "God help us."
RATING: D-
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