EVENT HORIZON
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A good cast, good special effects,
and an intriguing title all go to make a really
exciting-looking coming attraction. The film
itself has nearly nothing of value that was not in
the trailer. This is not so much set in the
universe of modern physics as in Clive Barker's
horror universe. This film is a loser. Rating: -1
(-4 to +4), 3 (0 to 10)
I have heard it observed that any film that starts out with an aerial view of a city is not a film worth seeing. That may be helpful on cable, but not for films in a movie theater. I guess I would claim that any film whose publicity uses the word "terror" is a film well worth avoiding. I saw a coming attraction for EVENT HORIZON and thought that it looked pretty good. At the time I did not realize that I knew the rule about the word "terror." I knew but knew not that I knew. I only realized that I knew when I looked up some information about this interesting looking film on the web and saw the word "terror" in the ad, that I realized it had to be a bad film and I knew that only on the basis of seeing that one word. PSYCHO is one film that could be said to produce terror, but the ads did not use the word. Hitchcock never claimed to be a master of terror; William Castle made that claim. As a rule of thumb, if you are terrified by a William Castle film you should wait five or six years until you hit puberty and try it again.
EVENT HORIZON is essentially a haunted house film in space that rather artfully uses scenes and touches from a lot of different films to tell a new story. There is a lot of ALIEN and a lot of HELLRAISER with bits of THE HAUNTING, FORBIDDEN PLANET, 2001, STAR TREK VI, MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN, THIS ISLAND EARTH, and probably others I missed.
These days too many films tend to have a great look but not very much content. It is the music video aesthetic. This is a film with great visual images, but the plot is really basically the haunted house film in space. The film shovels images at the viewer so fast that it is difficult to interpret just what has been seen, and really it may not matter. When you find out what is really going on, it is a real letdown. This has to be one of the least intriguing concepts possible for a film. I will not give it away, but this is more a Clive Barker sort of horror film in a science fiction setting than it is a science fiction film. The title is the most intriguing thing about the film, but "Event Horizon" is just the name of a spacecraft, and there is no internal evidence that anyone involved in the production knew even what the term meant.
This film is really a good cast wasted. Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne are, of course, major actors. I suspect they will take the money and run. But what makes the casting particularly unusual is the inclusion of Kathleen Quinlin of I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN. She is an actress who always added a certain fragility to her roles. She is sort of the anti-Bette-Davis. Here that quality is not just ignored, it is plastered over and she is nearly unrecognizable. She is cast against type and brings nothing special that is usable to her role.
This is a film that needed a writer with vision, but instead had one with a high concept. I would rate this letdown a -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
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