To Hell In A Handbasket
"Event Horizon" manages to raise the notion of "preposterous" to new heights.
What starts out as a promising premise, that of a derelict space ship on the edge of the solar system which has returned as a ghost ship from parts unknown, degenerates into an incomprehensible mess.
A rescue team led by Larry Fishburne is joined by the nightmare-prone scientist, Sam Neil, on a mission to rescue the Event Horizon and any surviving crew. For seven years the ship had been Somewhere, after trying out a new gravity drive which is supposed to use loopholes in relativity for effectively faster than light travel.
The ship seems to have been to hell and back, literally, and is now a flying haunted mansion that evokes nightmarish visions of hell in the rescue crew. All of that sounds like it should work. It doesn't.
The dialogue is by turns forced, silly, on the nose, or pure exposition. The plot devices have blinking red lights on them so you can't miss them. The "science" in this science fiction film is annoyingly stupid. (How about a guy in a space suit, floating outside a window, yelling and being heard from inside?)
The movie is nearly devoid of content and has to rely on cheap tricks in an attempt to startle the audience. Laughably loud edits and buckets of fake blood are but desperate band-aids over the holes through which air from the theatre is rushing in to fill the void. I got the impression more than once that it was made by people who as children stuck their friends' hands in buckets of cold spaghetti and peeled grapes on Halloween.
Here is your official "Event Horizon" sound designer guide:
1: All doors sound like full volume explosions when they open.
2: Anything that passes near the camera makes a whooshing
noise.
As a fitting finish, the closing credits run over something that was no doubt performed by people who would describe themselves as musicians, but who managed only to produce an unpleasent noise apparently designed to drive the remaining stragglers from the theatre.
Somone in the parking lot elevator after the movie said, "Maybe we should have seen 'George of the Jungle' instead."
Ditto.
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